


Lest The Oil That Is In Me Should Set Hell On Fire

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Drinking, Blood Kink, Blood and Gore, Boy King of Hell Sam Winchester, Castiel saunters vaguely downwards, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Group Sex, Hell, Implied/Referenced Incest, Knight of Hell Dean Winchester, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Psychological Torture, Rough Sex, Sexual Coercion, Torture, Violence, my god that's a lot of tags, shit's gonna get dark, they're all demons guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:01:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 36,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21682630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: Heaven and Hell are gearing up for war. Castiel, an angel stationed on Earth, is captured by demons and dragged to Hell, where the Boy King will spare no effort to convince him to join his ranks.
Relationships: Castiel/Meg Masters, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Meg Masters/Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Ruby/Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheGreenestGreenToEverGreen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGreenestGreenToEverGreen/gifts).



> Written for the SPN Reverse Bang! I want to give special thanks to my awesome artist, Silver, whose art post you should totally check out too, because it is AWESOME. You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21672508)

He was sitting alone in a corner of the bar.

Dean spotted him out of the corner of his eye. The table had been empty a second before and suddenly _he_ was there. Dean didn’t think anyone else had noticed how the man hadn’t actually walked inside of the bar and sat there. There was nothing really remarkable about him: he wore a suit and a blue tie, a tan trench coat that hanged loose for his shoulders. Anyone would’ve taken him for an accountant or a lawyer or an office worker. Some boring human coming to drink whatever sorrows plagued him away in this bar lost in Middle of Nowhere, USA.

Of course, Dean knew better. He’d been expecting him. He’d had his doubts about the info, but he was humble enough to admit when he was wrong. And now that all the pieces were in place, it was time to get to work. He knocked down his whiskey and motioned for the bartender to get closer.

“See that guy?” he said, sliding a twenty towards her. “Get him a drink for me, will you?”

The bartender smiled kindly at him.

“Anything for you, sweetheart.”

Dean watched close. The guy in the trench coat startled when the bartender placed the glass in front of him and then frowned. She shrugged and pointed at Dean, who waved at the man when his eyes fell on him.

He stared back, narrowing his eyes. Dean smiled, arrogantly, and waved. He was sure the cloaking spell he had on him was more than enough to hide his true nature from anyone. Even from an angel.

And he was right: after a while, the man waved back and pulled his glass closer.

Dean still waited a few seconds before he ordered another whiskey and sauntered towards the angel’s table.

“Hello, there,” he said, sitting down in front of him.

“Hello,” the angel said, tilting his head at him. “Umh… thank you, for the drink. You didn’t have to do that.”

Dean smiled. It was time to put his charm to work. It wasn’t really going to be that hard. The vessel the angel had chosen was very easy on the eyes: a man in his early forties, with bright blue eyes, dark brown hair and a five o’clock shade over his cheeks. Of course, Dean knew underneath he must have been a giant wheel of fire with thousands of eyes or a four-headed abomination the size of the Chrysler building. Still. He could work with his.

“Hey, it was my pleasure! I just thought you looked a little bit lonely over here. Figured you could use the company.”

“Oh.” The angel straightened his back, as if he was startled. “I don’t… I mean, I am not…”

“Didn’t say you were.” Dean shrugged. “But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of company, is there?”

“I… suppose.”

“Great, well. Let’s start with introductions.” He stretched his hand over the table. “My name’s Don.”

The angel eyed his hand for a second.

“Jimmy,” he said after a few seconds, and he shook it.

They were both lying through their teeth, but it didn’t matter. What matter was to keep the conversation and the drinks flowing.

It would have been very difficult to get an angel drunk, of course. But Dean had a few tricks up his sleeve for that too.

“So, what brings you here, Jimmy? Tough day at work?”

“You could say that,” he said.

He was taciturn and Dean figured this guy must not have been much fun at parties. Did angels have parties? Didn’t matter. It was good for his plans if “Jimmy” wasn’t particularly popular upstairs. No one was going to miss him.

“Yeah, I know how that can be like,” Dean said, feigning empathy. “Things just never seem to happen the way they’re supposed to and the higher-ups always find someone to blame for it.”

Jimmy raised his eyes at him, a sparkle of interest in his blue eyes.

“Exactly!” he said. He almost sounded surprise that “Don” understood him. “I have tried telling them maybe things not working out is for the better or that changing plans sometimes is necessary… but they don’t seem to want to hear it.”

“Stuck in their ways, huh?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Well, forget about them!” Dean raised his glass at him. “Tonight you get to… drink and make merry.”

He laughed when Jimmy threw him a confused look, as if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about. Oh, angels and their naiveté. Dean had wondered what it would be like to get one to do what he wanted… but of course, not this angel and not tonight. He had to keep his head on the mission. But maybe later Sam would let him have some fun…

“I’m not… I’m not sure I should be drinking,” Jimmy commented, looking down at his own glass. “I shouldn’t even be here, in fact.”

“Oh, come on, live a little!” Dean urged him. “What’s wrong with some indulgences, huh? It’s only human.”

He wondered if he was pushing his luck. Jimmy gave him a quizzical look, his eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was trying to figure out something about Dean. For a second or two, that intense gaze made him nervous, until the angel relaxed against his chair and picked up his glass.

“You’re right,” he said. “After all, we’re only human.”

They toasted and Dean was glad to see that Jimmy downed his whiskey in one gulp. This might be easier than he’d thought.

“So what do you work on, Don?”

“Oh, just, you know, the family business. We inherited from our father.”

“You must be in charge of it, then.”

“Actually, no, if you would believe it. My little brother is,” Dean said, sticking to the truth because it amused him to see how much he could get away with saying. “It’s better that way. He has more head for numbers and strategies and whatnot. I am just the muscle.”

“I think you sell yourself short. I’m sure you contribute more than just that.”

Was he hitting on Dean? That was a surprise. Maybe the angel was more down with debauchery than he’d pegged him for.

Later, Dean told himself as he signaled the bartender to come fill their glasses. Was this the fourth or the fifth time? Should he start acting drunk? Could Jimmy tell the difference?

It didn’t matter. Dean decided the angel was relaxed enough that he wouldn’t notice it when he did what he had planned.

It was as simple as a trick of hand. The potion had been made with Hell magic and demon blood, because obviously normal roofies wouldn’t work on him. It was tasteless and odorless and Jimmy didn’t flinch when he downed his glass after Dean had poured it in.

“It must be nice, though. To work with your family.”

“You don’t?” Dean raised an eyebrow. According to how little he knew about angel, they were always calling each other “brother” and “sister”. That might have been more honorific than anything, because Jimmy shook his head.

“I work for… something I believe in,” he explained. “At least I thought I believed in it. But lately…” He stopped himself and blinked a couple of times. “I am… I am talking too much.”

That was funny, considering he’d barely said anything all night and Dean had done most of the talking.

“Not at all, man. You’re not boring me.”

That wasn’t exactly what Jimmy had said, but it didn’t matter. Jimmy looked at him and blinked again, slowly this time. If the potion worked like Dean had been told it would, then his vision must have been going blurry and he would be feeling dizzy.

Exactly the way he wanted him.

He lowered his head and, with feigned concern, he asked:

“You okay?”

“Yes. No. I think…” Jimmy closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he seemed slightly bewildered. “I should go…”

He stumbled when he tried to stand up, and he would have fallen on his face if Dean hadn’t been there to catch his arm.

“Woah, there. Let me help you to your car.”

“I… I don’t have a car.”

“Let me help you to mine, then,” Dean said. “I think you had a bit too much whiskey to be driving anyway.”

“I… I don’t think… something’s…”

“Come on, I’ll give you a lift,” Dean said, cheerfully, still keeping the pretense of Don the friendly human.

It was too easy. Talking to him, slipping him the potion, dragging him outside of the bar. It had all been almost _disappointingly_ easy. Now all he had to do was knock him out, secure the Enochian handcuffs around his wrists and lock him in the trunk. With the way he stumbled and leaned all his weight on Dean, that didn’t seem like it would be a challenge.

Sam was going to be so pleased…

“Don. Don, stop, please. I can’t. I think I’m going to…”

Damn, maybe the potion had worked too well. Dean stopped and let the angel lean back against his car. It was a black 1967 Chevrolet Impala, which he’d chosen because a body could easily fit in the trunk. It didn’t hurt that the car also happened to look extremely good. Dean didn’t want the insides of it to reek of angel vomit for weeks on end after this mission.

Jimmy looked very pale in the parking lot’s light. He had his lips pressed tightly and his eyes fixed on the concrete floor as if he was waiting for it to stop moving. He still held onto Dean with one hand on his shoulder and took deep, slow gulps of breath.

“You okay there, man?” Dean asked him. Maybe he should just knock him out, drag him inside the trunk and be done with it.

“Yes. Yes, I’m okay,” Jimmy said. He lifted his face at him and suddenly, his eyes seemed ten times more determined than before. “Not that you would care, _demon_.”

Dean barely had time to realize the gig was up before Jimmy was on the attack. Suddenly, there was a glimmering silver blade in his hand, heading straight for Dean’s throat, and he had to move fast.

He jumped backwards. The tip of the blade ripped his shirt and drag itself across his chest before Dean managed to put himself out of its reach. His chest burned where the weapon had touched him, but it was nothing he couldn’t take. He reached back to take his own weapon, carefully tucked between his trousers and shirts and smiled when the angel’s eyes glimmered with recognition.

Dean wasn’t _a_ demon. He was the Knight of Hell, and he had the First Blade, the very weapon that had committed the first murder, to prove it. He was probably one of the three demons in existence that couldn’t be killed with a simple angel blade and “Jimmy” obviously knew it. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try: he clenched his jaw and tightened his grip around his own blade.

So this was going to have to go the bad way after all.

“What gave me away?” Dean asked.

Jimmy’s face was still pale, but his tone was firm: “You _reek_.”

“Damn, and here I thought I’d put on enough cologne…”

He couldn’t finish his joke, because Jimmy jumped towards him.

Dean had to admit it: even with the potion slowing him down, the angel was a formidable enemy. His movements were precise, studied, and he was definitely not above fighting dirty. He had Dean on the defensive in two movements and somehow managed to elbow him in the face.

The hit sent a shot of pain through Dean’s head and had blinded him for a few seconds… just long enough for Jimmy to tried and stab him. All Dean could do was raise his arm to protect his throat, but that didn’t stop the angel: the blade went right though, it, the heavenly metal searing through his skin and his flesh.

Dean let a growl of pain and blindly lunged his fist forwards. It impacted on the angel’s chin, who staggered backwards, taking his blade out at the same time. Dean’s black blood dripped on the floor as the angel recovered his balance and prepared to jump at him again.

In the second, in the fraction of a second, that it took for him to do that, Dean made a choice. He was hurt, the effect of the potion was not going to last, Jimmy was a great fighter and he was _pissed_. Not as pissed as Sam was going to be when he found out Dean had failed, but Dean preferred to put himself at the mercy of his brother rather than that of an angel who wouldn’t hesitate to smite him.

So he did the only rational thing he could do under these circumstances: he turned heel and fled for the car.

“Abomination!” Jimmy screamed as Dean jumped on the driver’s seat and ordered the engine to roar to life with a bolt of his power.

As the car sped away, Dean allowed himself to stick his good hand out of the window and flip Jimmy the bird. The car was angel-proofed, so he felt brave enough to do that, at least.

The momentary satisfaction it brought him, however, was nothing compared to the fury he felt once he was back in the bathroom of his motel bedroom. The motherfucker had drawn blood: Dean’s nose was crooked and there was blood dripping down his chin and his chest. And of course, his favorite shirt was ruined now. Dean took it off, rip it to shreds and used those to wrap the wound in his arm. If he’d been hurt by a common weapon, he would be healing already, but who knew how long was a stab by an angel blade going to take.

He gritted his teeth, grabbed his nose with his healthy hand and pushed his nose bone back in its place. He let out a scream as he did and his eyes went pitch black in the mirror, revealing his true nature.

He came back to see the hitchhiker he’d kidnapped on the road was cowering in a corner. His eyes were wide with terror and his screams were muffled when he saw Dean walking back into the room. He shrunk in the corner, but there was nowhere he could go handcuffed to the radiator as he was.

Dean opened his duffle bag and took out his chalice and a knife. A simple, hunting knife. Humans were fragile enough that he didn’t need anything else.

“Sorry, man,” he told the hitchhiker casually as he knelt in front of him. The guy was so terrified he didn’t even attempt to kick at him. Even then, he wouldn’t have done much except piss Dean off further, so it was almost a blessing he didn’t. “Wish we could have had more time to have fun together… but I gotta make a call.”

He slid the knife across the man’s throat with such expertise he was dead before he even had time to suffer. Well, Dean figured a few seconds passed before he finally choked on his blood, but he didn’t suffer for long. The demon held the chalice to the open wound, patiently waiting until a pool formed on the bottom. He then dipped his finger in it and stirred it, muttering words in Latin until the connection was made.

“Meg,” he called out. “Your cloaking spell was shit.”

“You know, there is a little thing that humans invented,” a hoarse female voice said from the bed. “It’s called a cellphone. Using it is less messy.”

Dean turned around to found Meg sitting on the bed. Her human skin made her look like a young, attractive woman, with a bored expression upon her round face as she fidgeted with a long brown curl between her fingers.

“Would you have picked up?” Dean asked, leaving the chalice and the knife on the night table.

Meg’s brown eyes looked up and down him. Dean let her figure out by herself what had happened as he opened the small fridge and helped himself to some beer.

“I take it you didn’t catch the angel.”

“He realized who I was,” Dean said.

He was starting to get pissed again, remembering how the angel had put him on the defensive and made him flee. It had been humiliating, his arm still hurt and he was not above taking his anger out on someone else.

Meg seemed to realize this, because the explanation she offered could have been truth, but it just as easily could have been complete bullshit meant to stroke his ego:

“Maybe we should have made the spell a little stronger. It wore off faster on you than it would have on a regular demon.”

Dean finished his bottle, used to open a second one and walked up to her.

“There’s no _we_ in this situation, Meg,” he growled. “Sam asked me to do one simple thing, you said you were going to help. I went along with your stupid plan…”

“Because _your_ plan was to just charge against him guns a-blazing!” she replied, standing up to face him. Her meatsuit was short, but the high heel boots she wore more than made up for it. She still needed to raise her chin at him to make herself look more imposing. “And all you would’ve had to show Sammy for your effort would have been your angel-smote corpse.”

Dean backhanded her, hard. The sound of skin smacking against skin sent a satisfactory shiver down his spine and took a bit of the edge off.

“Only I can call him that,” he warned her.

Meg’s glare was full of rage, but she had the good sense to bit her tongue back. Still, there was a trickle of blood on the edge of her lips that prompted Dean to push her down on the bed. He climbed on top of her and held her hands above her head, while taking a sip from the bottle with the other, considering.

He knew Sam wasn’t going to care what he did with her. They were brothers. They shared everything, including his concubines. Dean didn’t particularly like any of the three, but Meg was probably the one he hated less, so he hadn’t been too inclined to be rough on her. That could change depending on how uppity she was going to act from now on.

“You better have a plan B,” he told her as he leaned his head to nuzzle her neck. “Because we can’t come back empty-handed…”

“I thought this wasn’t a we situation,” she teased him.

Dean shoved his hand up her shirt and squeezed one of her breasts until she screamed.

“Are you getting cute with me, Meg?”

“Never,” Meg said. “I know my place. If the King of Hell says _‘Spread your legs’_ , I say _‘How wide?’_ ”

“Is that right?” Dean asked. He let go of her wrists to unbutton her jeans, but Meg kept her arms straight up above her head.

“Yes. And if he says _‘Bring me an angel’_ … I know he’s not talking about the ones you place on top of the tree.”

Dean pulled her jeans down. She hadn’t bothered with underwear, which was just fine by him.

“Smart girl.”

He finished his second beer and placed the tip of the bottle against her labia. Meg’s body tensed and then relaxed as the cold glass made its way inside of her body. A soft, strangled moan escaped her lips, almost like she was trying to hold it back. Dean knew he could do much worse. He could break it and cut her, he could really make it hurt. She’d enjoy it. There was some fucked up circuit inside a demon’s mind that made them equate pain with pleasure and oh, did Dean love to inflict pain on them.

But the matter of the angel was still plaguing his mind, so he’d settle for just taking out his frustration out on her and leaving the more refined forms of torture for when they came home. If whatever plan they tried next didn’t work, he could always convince Sam that it had all been Meg’s fault and have her take the fall for it.

It seemed like she was thinking that too, because she started talking, interrupting herself every time Dean pushed the bottle a little deeper inside of her.

“There’s, uh… there’s something else we could try.”

“I’m all ears.”

“We could… we could do what I suggested… in the beginning. _Oh_.”

“What was that again?”

“You could….” Meg stopped between two deep pants and lifted her head a little, almost like he wanted to watch Dean’s face closely as she went on: “You could let _me_ slip him the potion.”

Dean vaguely remembered Meg suggesting something like that before he’d decided to go into the bar alone. He’d rejected the idea because while he didn’t particularly care what happened to her, Sam would be angry if he broke one of his toys and besides, he could handle it alone.

Or thought he could handle it alone.

Worst case scenario, Meg got herself killed and he didn’t get the angel. Sam was going to be angry for a while, but it wasn’t anything Dean had dealt with before. If it worked and they managed to capture him after all, all Dean would have to do was make sure she didn’t take all the credit. And even if she tried…

It didn’t really matter. What this bitch and all of the other demons didn’t understand was that Sam was _his_ brother. He didn’t have to play their petty little games for power or beg for a scrap of Sam’s attention, because he was already the only one who counted with the King’s absolute trust.

He _belonged_ to Sam and Sam knew this.

So he risked nothing and the rewards could potentially be huge.

He watched Meg writhe and moan on the mattress underneath him.

“Alright.” Dean pulled the bottle. It came out with a suction sound and a little yelp from Meg’s lips. “Let’s try it your way.”

“Really?” she asked. She sounded surprised that he’d accepted so easily, but Dean knew she was smart enough not to push her luck.

He placed the bottle on his lips and gulped down the rest of its content, savoring the alcohol mixed with the spicy taste of the woman Meg pretended to be. When he was done, he threw it away over his shoulder and heard it shatter as he unzipped his pants to free his erection.

“Yes,” he said. “Now, open your legs, bitch.”


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel was sick for the entire day that followed his encounter with the demon. No, not a demon. He’d seen the Mark in his arm, the Blade he’d used. That was a Knight of Hell, _the_ Knight of Hell. His head had spun when the realization had dawned on him. What was he doing there, why was he trying to get to him?

It didn’t matter. All he could do was pull through the fog that was clouding his brain and fight him off. He’d managed to make the Knight retreat, but he still felt weak and tired. He’d barely managed to fly away from the parking lot into an abandoned house he knew before collapsing. He’d woken up in excruciating, debilitating pain, like needles sticking into every cell, his very being burning up.

“It’s okay. Hey, it’s okay,” he’d heard someone say as a pair of hands ran through his hair.

“What is wrong with him?”

“I don’t really know. He just showed up…”

That was all he could hear before the darkness swallowed him whole again. It was a strange sensation, to faint. Angels didn’t need to sleep; they didn’t need any source of energy aside from their own grace. But whatever it was that the demon had slipped him, it was apparently strong enough that all of that energy was concentrated on saving his vessel. Why it couldn’t just explode so he’d be free of that suffering, free to find himself a new body, Castiel couldn’t quite explain it.

After what felt like an eternity, he came to when he heard a voice repeating the same call over and over again.

_Castiel. Report yourself. Castiel. Report yourself. Castiel…_

The voice was speaking Enochian, the language of angels and it was demanding. It took him a few extra seconds after hearing it to realize it was his superior, Naomi, who was calling.

“I’m here,” he muttered and then realized that, of course, she wasn’t able to hear that. He rolled over to lay on his back and looked up. A piece of dark blue sky, starless and melancholic, poked through the hole in the ceiling. Of course, Heaven wasn’t really up there, but he’d spent enough time among humans to adopt some of their uses. Looking up when they prayed was one.

_I’m here. I’m alive._

The repetitive message stopped and immediately changed.

_Well, of course you’re alive. We would’ve known if you’d died._

Expressions of happiness or even relief at his well-being would’ve been too much to ask and of course Castiel didn’t expect it. He still had to hide his annoyance at that reply.

_You failed to report to the captain of your garrison three nights ago. Explain yourself._

Three nights? The demons poison had really done a number of him.

Castiel began explaining: he’d been at the bar preaching, doing his duty trying to save stray souls (he omitted to say that he hadn’t really talked to anyone until “Don” approached him), when the demon had attacked him. He also didn’t mention that he’d failed to realize he was a demon at first and that it had been his own distraction and stupidity that had put him in danger.

Luckily for him, Naomi was alarmed enough by the very presence of the Knight of Hell that she didn’t press him for details.

_We shall put all of our stationed soldiers on high alert of any sign of demonic activity. Thank you, Castiel._

_You’re wel-_

_Please, get back on duty._

What else did he expect?

He almost thought about staying there and not doing what Naomi had said, but that would’ve been a form of rebellion after receiving a direct order. And of course, rebellion of any kind wasn’t really tolerated in his line of work.

In any case, he wasn’t in pain anymore and his head felt practically normal. He really had no excuse not to get going.

When he sat up, he realized someone had moved him into a mattress or maybe he’d landed on one when he first flew into the abandoned building. The place was falling apart, but several homeless people still used it as a refuge. Castiel had made sure to become a familiar sight among all of them. Part of his duty was to rescue stray souls and well, there was no one more stray than these people.

But he’d also found things he hadn’t been expecting among them. Generosity and care and patience that he’d rarely seen among others who lacked nothing. So of course, if those people had seen him stumbling in there, weak and hurt, they would have cared for him.

He found two of the regulars on the other room. They were two old men called Rufus and Bobby, who were often grumpy and bitter, but who had hearts of gold all the same. They had started a fire on a barrel to cook their meager dinner (instant noodles and some bread that they had probably rescued from a dumpster behind the local restaurants) and the both looked up when they heard Castiel coming in.

“Well, he ain’t dead,” Bobby said, as he placed the pot on top of the fire and began stirring. “You owe me five dollars, Rufus.”

The raggedy clothes, their unwashed and unkempt beards and their calloused hands indicated that they didn’t have five dollars between the two of them. Rufus shrugged and got back to what he was doing: rummaging through his shopping cart.

“How about some moonshine?” he offered instead.

Bobby thought about it and picked up his dirty and chipped cup so Rufus could pour him the promised drink.

“How about you, preach?” Bobby asked him.

They called him “preach”, short for “preacher”, because Castiel was always talking to them about Heaven and its promises, about how this life wasn’t all there was and there was something else, something better, waiting for them if they dared to straighten their paths. Very few of them paid attention to his words, but many accepted the food and money that Castiel always had on him.

“Thank you, but no.”

“What kind of trouble did you get into?” Rufus asked. His dark face wrinkled when he narrowed his eyes at Castiel, as if he was trying to make out exactly what it was he’d done. “It’s unlike you to show up drunk out of your mind like that and sleep the entire weekend.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Castiel said, defensively. He stopped for a few seconds to wonder how much he could reveal. “I did stop for a drink at a bar, but I think someone might have slipped something else in it. I remember a man attacking me.”

Rufus and Bobby nodded, as if that made all the sense in the word.

“So you got roofied and robbed. Tough luck,” Bobby determined. He took out the wooden spoon, blew on the hot water on it and tasted it. He winced. “Do we have salt?”

“A package of salt, coming right at you, chef,” Rufus said and went back to rummaging through his cart.

“Well… I think I will be on my way,” Castiel announced.

The two old men gave no indication of having heard him. Castiel walked past their improvised kitchen and headed for the rackety stairs that headed down. It was a miracle (one of Castiel’s miracles, in fact) that they hadn’t collapsed and rendered the house’s second floor inaccessible.

“Preach!”

Castiel turned around to see Rufus coming at him.

“Hey, I hate to ask you this, but is there any chance you have some money left?” he asked. “I understand the dude that roofied you probably took your wallet, but I don’t like owing people money.”

Castiel wondered why it was that Rufus didn’t consider him “people”. Perhaps it was the fact he thought that Castiel, as the man of the cloth that they’d mistaken him for, had the obligation of always give generously, no matter his circumstances. Or perhaps, on a subconscious level, they knew what Castiel was, that he wasn’t a man at all.

The angel sank his hands in his empty pockets and manifested a twenty-dollar bill. He could have just as easily manifested fifty or a couple hundred or a winning lottery ticket, but he’d learned with time that people like Rufus didn’t like receiving large amounts of cash and if they did, they began to get suspicious and wonder where it came from. As part of his mission, Castiel needed to remain inconspicuous.

He’d questioned that need many times. Why couldn’t they just reveal themselves to humans, why couldn’t they help them more directly? He’d received a harsh reprimand instead of an answer and he’d learned to keep quiet afterwards.

He handed the bill to Rufus.

“Thanks, preach. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Take care, Rufus,” Castiel replied, patting him in the back before he walked down the stairs and walked out into the street.

The night was chilly, with dark thick clouds covering the sky. Castiel knew it wouldn’t rain, however. He wished it would. That way he would have an excuse to stay inside and talk the night away with those two drunks, who, for all their posturing and grumpiness, were extremely kind when they wanted to be. The insinuation would have offended them both, of course.

But as things were, Castiel had to keep moving. That was his life, his mission: always moving, always talking, ceaselessly following Heaven’s command. That was what he’d been created for and wishing anything else (to rest, to stop, to contemplate for once instead of just acting) was a failure on his part. Sometimes he wondered if his Father had created him like this, imperfect and full of doubts, to test him.

Last night he’d failed and he’d almost been taken by a demon for it, so he should learn his lesson about it. It was strange, however. The demon hadn’t tried hurting him or killing him. Perhaps he wanted to take him somewhere else before he did. Heaven knew there was a lot someone could do with an angel’s power and no scruples.

He chose a street downtown, a seedy, dark place where prostitutes conducted their business. There were brothels barely disguised as strip clubs and motels where they could take their clients, corners and alleyways where the johns could park their cars and neon signs underneath which they could stand, smoking and making come hither gestures at the men who walked past them.

“Hey, mister, looking to have some fun?”

“Come on, daddy, take me somewhere nice.”

“I have a special price for you, handsome.”

Castiel ignored their heavy makeup and colorful wigs, the skimpy clothes and vertiginous heels. He tried to look past them, to see the women underneath their shameless offers for carnal pleasure. Their despair, their fear, the circumstances that had pushed to this. Some of them had chosen this life, yes, but others did it because they had no choice: they had mouths to feed at home or threatening men whose fists they feared more than the loss of their dignity looming over them. Some had lost everything, some had been deserted by the people who were meant to love them, some didn’t think they deserved any better.

Castiel saw this, he soaked in it, he looked into their eyes to take in their pain. He was searching for a soul to save.

“Do you have a light?” a hoarse voice called from his left.

Castiel saw her and knew that she was the woman he would try to save that night. She wore a miniskirt and a short fur coat over her tube shirt that revealed a flat stomach and a ring on her navel, but she had very little make up and let her wavy dark hair fall on her shoulders naturally. There was something about her, something that told him she wasn’t as far gone as some of the other woman he’d passed by. If he was being honest with himself, he had to admit he’d chosen her because she seemed like an easy fix, and after the events of the night before, Castiel figured he deserved something easy for once.

He manifested a lighter in the same fashion he’d manifested the bill earlier and took it out of his pocket. She put a cigarette between her full lips and waited for him to turn it on for them. She took one long drag and then smirked at him, almost playfully.

“Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome,” Castiel said. “Umh…”

“Meg,” she said. “And you are?”

“Jimmy.”

He didn’t know why he’d chosen that human name. It reminded him of a girl he’d failed to save years ago. She was sixteen years. Castiel had found her selling herself on the street and taken her to a diner to listen to her story. Sometimes that was all those lost people needed: for someone to listen to them, to pay attention to their stories. Confession was good for the soul.

The girl’s name was Claire and she told Castiel he reminded her of her father, Jimmy. He’d abandoned her and her mother years before, though Claire had always kept hope that he’d return. Her mother and grandmother had kicked her out of their home when Claire had revealed to them she was in love with another girl, and now she was trying to travel to California. For some reason, she’d convinced herself that she would find out what’d happened to her father there. Castiel had given her enough money for a bus ticket and hoped that she’d find her promised land on the other side of the country. He thought about her often and how he wished he’d really been her father. Perhaps that was why he’d kept the name.

This woman was older, but she reminded him of Claire in a way. Something about her sharp smile, about the pain she hid behind her eyes.

“Well, hey, Jimmy. Are you looking for some company?”

Despite how long he’d been doing this, Castiel never quite knew how to react to those bold requests.

“I, umh…”

“Come on.” Meg took a step closer to him. The scent of her cigarette smoke mixed with her cheap perfume and her sweat. “What else would you come here for?”

“I… I don’t mean to disrespect you…” Castiel stammered as she stood right in front of him and stood on the tip of her toes. Her lips ghosted over his neck and for a second or two, he forgot himself. He forgot he was an angel and he was supposed to be above those sort of temptation. To want a woman with the intensity that he wanted her in that moment… it wasn’t new for him to experience a sudden bolt of lust going through his body, the flesh he’d been trapped into for too long getting aroused at the closeness of another, but he’d always managed to resist.

He had the exhilarating feeling it would be different with Meg. Or it would have been, if she hadn’t added:

“For the right price, you can disrespect me all you want.”

He remembered then why he’d chosen her. Not to use her like Heaven knew how many had before, but to save her.

He placed his hands on her waist and delicately, but firmly, pushed her away from him.

“No.”

A rapid succession of emotions went through her mind. Hurt and anger, which were quickly replaced by fear, and then back to the same playful smile as before. But it had lost some of its charm. Castiel could see the cracks underneath.

“You don’t have to play hard to get with me, babe,” Meg said, still trying to get closer to him, lifting her face at him as if she was trying to kiss him. “I can give you anything you want.”

“I don’t want this. I’m sorry,” Castiel said, stepping back.

The fear returned to Meg’s face quickly.

“No, come on,” she said, and there was a pleading tone in her voice now. “You have to help me out here. I haven’t had any luck all night…”

Her voice broke down in a strangled sob. She quickly covered her mouth and turned around, her shoulders shaking as she tried to contain her tears. Castiel was slightly vindicated. If she was wearing her heart on her sleeve like this, it meant this life hadn’t hardened her yet and perhaps it would be easy to convince her to change.

“Don’t cry, please,” he said. He manifested a handkerchief and handed it to her. She accepted it and continued to cry with her face hidden inside it. “Please. Tell me how can I help you.”

“You… you can’t…” she stuttered. “Unless you want to… please…”

Castiel took a step forwards and grab her by the shoulder. She startled and look up at him, hope lightening up her eyes.

“Where are we going?”

“Have you eaten?”

Meg frowned, but shook her head.

“There’s a diner a few blocks from here,” Castiel said. “Let me buy you something.”

“Oh, no. I can’t. I have to keep on working…”

“I haven’t had dinner either and I don’t like eating alone,” Castiel replied. “I will pay you for the company. Wasn’t that what you offered?”

Meg frowned, as many of the other women when they realized he had no interest in their bodies but that he still wanted to spend some time with them. It was sad to realize many didn’t believe this, but the promise of money in exchange for just sitting at his table was usually enough.

It was for Meg, too.

“You’re a very strange man,” she told him.

“Thank you.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been told that and it wouldn’t be the last. Not being a man at all had a lot to do with it, of course.

The waitress knew he was a regular. She took Meg’s order but she didn’t bother with his, and still returned with the usual coffee and toasts that Castiel only half-pretended to eat. Meg had a sandwich, French fries and a soda. She tried to eat slow at first, but it was obvious soon enough that she was starving and her bites became wider.

He watched her closely in the meantime. She looked younger than he’d thought at first: early twenties, maybe even still a teenager. She had a beautiful round face and a pair of bright brown eyes. Yes, there was definitely something sharp about her, hidden right underneath the surface, but at this very moment, she looked as innocent as she could be.

“So, Jimmy… you bring lost souls into this diner often?” Meg asked him.

Castiel startled at the choice of words.

“I try to help,” he said. “I do believe that a single gesture of kindness can have… untold repercussions.”

“Oh, no.” Meg threw herself back on the chair. “You’re not going to try and convince me I need to give my life to the Lord or something like that?”

“The Lord doesn’t need more lives dedicated to him,” Castiel said. He was surprised at the bitterness of his own tone and he immediately shook his head. He needed to remember his place and his mission. “But which I try to say, you shouldn’t want to change your life because of what He will think of you. You should try and change it because of you.”

Meg let out a wry laugh.

“It’s easier said than done,” she replied and took a sip from her soda, avoiding Castiel’s eye.

“How come?” Castiel said.

She threw him a sheepish look and he shrugged.

“If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. We can talk about something else.”

“I’m just trying to figure out why the hell would you want to talk about me to begin with,” she said, plainly.

“You don’t think you’re important enough to be talked about?”

She scoffed. “Okay, let me see if I can put this in a way that you will understand: I’m someone’s whore. I have always been nothing but someone’s whore.”

Castiel was a bit taken aback by the bitterness and directness of her words, but he had learned that when humans felt this furious, they were usually entitled to their rage.

“I have always belonged to someone,” she continued. “Always served someone. I’ve never had anything that was just mine, because I wanted it. Do you know what that is like?”

He surprised himself by thinking he did. He had spent his entire existence, eons, measures of time that humans couldn’t even comprehend, serving Heaven. Whenever he’d wanted, whenever he’d been selfish or disobedient, he’d been rightfully punished for it. Even right now, walking among humans and dedicating himself to the Sisyphean task of trying to save one soul at a time, was a punishment of sorts, because he’d dared to question…

“I can’t imagine,” he lied.

“Well, it’s shit,” Meg said, rolling her eyes. “But what can I do?”

Castiel thought about this question for a moment.

“The man you belong to,” he said. He didn’t want to outright say ‘your pimp’, but they both knew that was who they were talking about here. “Are you scared of him?”

Meg lowered her eyes and didn’t say a word for a while.

“You have no idea what he is like.”

Castiel did. He’d met men like him, plenty of them. Brutish and abusive, men who only took, took and took. They robbed these women of their autonomy, of their humanity, under the guise of protection and generosity. He’d helped some women escape from them, accompanied them to get their stuff when they finally made the decision to leave those men.

Some of these men had simply moved their business elsewhere, some had tried to retaliate. They had learned soon enough that you couldn’t kill an angel with a simple knife or a gun, that fighting him or trying to scare him was useless. Castiel knew it was a little bit against the rules, but he hadn’t been too concerned about showing some of his powers off to them because, who was going to believe them? And the rumors about Castiel had been more than enough to dissuade them from trying anything against them.

It wasn’t always that easy, of course. Many women didn’t believe his promises of freedom. Some thought he was merely a different kind of pimp, or, like Meg, that he was trying to recruit them into some sort of cult where they would enjoy even less freedom. Some of them didn’t doubt his good intentions, but they were so used to the life they had the idea of changing it terrified them. Yes, they suffered and it was bad, but it could be so much worse still, so why risk it at all?

He said something along those lines to Meg.

“You hold on to a rope while you hang over a dark pit underneath you,” he told her. “You don’t know what’s down there, but you’re scared and you’ve been holding on to that rope for so long… you don’t realize it’s choking you.”

Meg tilted her head at him. Her smile was full of irony now.

“That’s a really nice speech. How often does it work?”

He smiled. He really liked her attitude, her humor. He pitied her, in the same way he pitied all humans for being fragile, mortal things, but he had the impression he would hate him if he expressed something like that. So, instead, he said:

“A lot more than you’d think.”

She grinned at him and shook her head.

“I should get back to work.”

She seemed pensive, though. Perhaps Castiel had got to her after all. Saving her wasn’t going to be a one-night job, but it was something to keep working at. That was his duty.

He walked her to the diner’s door.

“Are you sure you don’t want to…?” Meg asked him when he handed her a bill.

“I’m sure.”

She gave him a quizzical look as she took the money and hid it away in her cleavage.

“Can I give you something, though?” she asked him. “On the house.”

Castiel frowned at her, but before he had time to protest, she put a hand on the back of his face and pulled him closer. His mouth met hers and he shivered, his lips parting before he could stop himself. Meg deepened the kiss, her tongue softly touching his, warm and wet and unexpected. The same wave of lust return to him, stronger than before. His hands grabbed unto her waist and he had to use every ounce of his angelic self-control not to squeeze her against him, not to turn her around and run his fingers through her hair, not to take her right then and there as if he was a common man.

It lasted an eternity and not enough. She stepped back, still smiling at him, and rubbed her thumb at the edge of his lips. Castiel wished she hadn’t. He might have looked ridiculous, but he wanted to remember that kiss and something as simple as a stain of her make-up would…

His vision became blurry.

Castiel opened his mouth and closed it again. He’d never needed to breathe, but he was finding out he was running out of air now and his entire body was shutting down all of the sudden.

“What…?” he murmured. He gasped for air and looked down, as an acute pain expanded from his stomach up. When he looked down, he saw a small rip in his suit and shirt.

The knife in Meg’s hand had the blade stained with something dark, a liquid that smelled like Hell itself. He hadn’t even felt it go in.

His knees gave out and the floor rose to catch him. Castiel fought to stay awake, to keep his eyes even as his body starting shutting down once again. He fixed his gaze on the pair of high heels coming his way.

Meg crouched by his side and when Castiel looked up, he noticed something he must have seen long before: her sweet brown eyes had turned pitch black, without a hint of white anywhere.

Demon.

“Nothing personal, angel,” she said as Castiel lost his consciousness for the second time in as many days.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam was a visionary.

Of course, there were those in Hell who failed to recognize that, but he couldn’t be blamed for that. All he could do, really, was keep his plans moving forwards and the naysayers… well, Dean could always use a new chew toy when he started to get antsy.

The bad thing about Dean not being there was that Sam had to take matters into his own hands.

Lilith hanged from the Catherine wheel, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders. She was breathing in short, agitated puffs, her face red and her milky white eyes set on Sam. There were demons who insisted on keeping their human skin even down there. Lilith, on the other hand, let her monstrous soul shine through: the horns rising over her head, her scaly skin, her long claws. When Sam came closer to her, she hissed at him, stretching her long forked tongue through a row of sharp teeth.

“Come on, now,” Sam told her, grabbing her chin and forcing her to look up at him. “We’ve done this dance before, Lilith. You know how it ends.”

“One day, it’s going to end with me eating your heart out,” she threatened.

Sam sighed. Lilith was one of his consorts, technically. When he’d ascended to the throne, he’d taken three of them in an attempt to bring the different factions of Hell to heel. The thing was, Lilith wasn’t a fool. She had been a contender for the throne —a fierce one, at that— and she knew now that Sam only trusted her as far as he could throw her. So instead of trying to keep him pleased like Ruby and Meg did, Lilith was always provoking him, always conspiring, always trying something out.

Dean had suggested to just lock her away in a cell and forget about her forever, but Sam found her attempts at betrayals entertaining enough that, after some torture and threats, he always let her come back to his side. Until the next time he found her conspiring, obviously. That was a form of torture itself: to give her the hope that she was going to be able to overthrow him, only to pull the rug from underneath her at the last possible second.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Sam said, tapping at the carving on his chest, right over his heart, with the tip of his blade. At first glance, the scar looked like a spiral, but upon closer inspection, it was obvious it consisted on three concentric sixes. “I’m the chosen one, remember? The Boy King. And you…” He roughly grabbed her cheeks and forced her to look up at him. “… are nothing.”

“Skip the foreplay, will you, dear?” Lilith told him, rolling his eyes. “I’m getting bored.”

Sam was about to tell her to be careful what she wished for when the dungeon’s door opened. He looked over his shoulder, annoyed at the interruption.

“I’m busy!”

“I know, your Majesty,” Ruby said, respectfully. “Forgive me. But you told me to inform you when Dean and Meg came back…”

Sam noticed Lilith’s ears perking up and he slapped her. She needed to learn not to poke her nose in things that were none of her business.

“Good.” He grabbed his shirt from the chair where he left it to avoid it getting blood stains. He didn’t bother with shoes. “I’ll tell Dean to come pay you a visit later.”

He was rewarded with a flash of fear in Lilith’s face that disappeared as fast as it came. He savored it nonetheless. There was no demon in Hell dumb enough to want to find themselves on the wrong end of the Knight’s blade. It was a point of pride for Sam that his brother was so well renowned in his dominion.

He locked the dungeon’s door in his wake and walked down the dimly-lit hallway until he was sure that Lilith wouldn’t hear them.

“Did they bring it? Did you see it?” he asked, not even bothering to hide his anxiety.

“Yes.” Ruby stopped and hesitated. “He… he isn’t what I was expecting.”

Of course it wasn’t. To demons, angels were the ultimate nightmare. Terrifying weapons, beings of infinite power that could pulverize them with a snap of their fingers. One of the things Sam was hoping to achieve with this new plan was to demystify them, to show them angels could be broken and, if it came to that, killed.

He had no idea how to kill an angel, exactly, but him and Dean were a great team when it came to finding out how to kill something.

“But they caught him!”

“Yes.”

Sam grabbed Ruby’s hand, twirled her and pulled him closer. Ruby laughed as Sam dipped her down for a kiss. She was the only one of her consorts that actually seemed to enjoy her position. She had been the first one to kneel and to accept Sam as the new king. She was always eager to please him, always ready to follow his instructions. She knew it unnerved him to see demons without their human skins, so she usually appeared like right now: a brunette woman with olive skin, full lips and a wicked smile, always ready for him to take her in his arm and do as he pleased.

Sam didn’t trust her any more than he trusted Lilith. There was something almost pathetic in the way she groveled, something that made him suspicious. Maybe she really cared for him as she claimed, maybe she really wanted him to succeed as King of Hell. But then again, maybe it was all an act to get him to trust her, to get him to lower his guard around her.

It really didn’t matter. Ruby had not tried to betray him yet, but Sam was certain that he’d made Lilith enough of an example for her to know that was not the most convenient thing for herself.

He broke apart from her and grabbed her by the shoulder.

“Let’s go. I want to see it.”

Ruby guided him down the hall towards his Throne Room. The obsidian palace that stood tall on the cliffs overseeing hell had been the sitting for the previous king and it had almost everything Sam could possibly need: rooms for him, his brother and his concubines, dungeons on where to lock away his enemies, and, of course, the throne room. The palace sometimes changed and shifted with his whimsy, since Hell had become so attuned to his will, but mostly it remained the same.

The Throne Room, for example, was almost subdued. It didn’t have decorations hanging from the walls, just a tall black chair sitting in the middle of it where Sam could rest if he so chose. There were no carpets, no hangings on the wall. Even the windows were too tall to look at the eternally red sky. Sam preferred it that way. It was a reminder to everyone who came in there that they were meant to do one thing and one thing alone: to worship him.

Meg and Dean didn’t need that reminder.

Sam’s eyes fell on the angel’s face, on the defiance in his blue eyes and the angry clench of his jaw and he had to hold his breath for a moment. He was not expecting him to be this beautiful and fearsome, even subdued as he was. Meg and Dean were each holding one of his arms, that were immobilized in front of him with the special shackles covered in Enochian symbols that Sam himself had made to neutralize his powers, but he still stared at him with such fierceness that Sam had no doubt in his mind he would try and kill him if they let him get away.

It was fascinating. Like watching a proud lion locked away in a cage. Sam didn’t hold back how impressed he was.

“Amazing,” he said, stepping closer to the angel to look at him. “You’re… incredible.”

The angel said nothing, but his blue eyes flared with barely contained anger. Sam smiled at him.

“Do you have any idea who I am?”

“Of course I do. You’re Sam Winchester,” the angel answered, pronouncing his name like it was an insult. His voice was deep and gruff, and Sam could imagine it easily booming with righteousness to scare away his enemies. “You’re Lucifer’s chosen.”

“That’s right.” Sam smiled at him. “Dean, Meg, let go of him. And take off his shackles.”

“What?” Dean asked. His face scrunched up in concern. “We can’t…”

“Do it,” Sam insisted.

Dean and Meg exchanged a look. They were often at odds with each other, mostly because Dean didn’t like that Meg questioned him, but this seemed to be one of the rare occasions when the two of them were in agreement over something.

“My lord, if I may…” Meg started.

“You may not. Unshackle him.”

There was another moment of hesitation, but Dean finally reached into his pockets and took out the key. Meg let go of the angel’s elbow and stepped away to stand next to Ruby, who was also staring at the entire operation with eyes wide open. Sam had no doubt in his mind that the both of them would run away should anything go awry.

He smiled at them confidently as Dean manipulated the shackles. The angel simple stared, his face entirely emotionless until the shackles clattered on the ground. He then turned his smoldering gaze towards Sam.

“Your reputation in Heaven is that of a clever leader,” he commented, as he slowly rubbed his wrists where the shackles had been.

“Why, thank you.”

“It seems that reputation is wrong.”

And then he did exactly what Sam was expecting him to do: he extended his hand and unleashed a wave of power over him.

Sam felt it everywhere at the same time: on his skin, burning like a fire, on his guts, on the scar on his chest that burned all of the sudden. He should have been scared, perhaps, because he knew that power was trying to destroy him, but he didn’t. He was just fascinated at the angel, at the way the glow around him intensified, his eyes burning white, the shadow that his wings casted on the wall behind him.

He was truly magnificent. If this was the creature that killed him, Sam would not have felt disappointed in the slightest.

But of course, he wasn’t planning on dying just yet.

It lasted a second, maybe two. Ruby and Meg had jumped backwards while Dean had stuck his hand inside of his jacket, reaching for his blade, but Sam was faster than any of them. He felt his own power, the black blood that sang in his vein, pulsing inside of him. The blessing he’d received, the one that gave him command over this realm, would not permit him to be killed in his own Throne Room, even by something as powerful as this angel.

He raised his own hand and for a second, the angel’s power pushed against his own, resisted him. But when Sam flickered his wrist, the angel was thrown across the room and landed against the wall with a thud as if he never could’ve fought Sam. The place became darker as his halo stopped shining and he seemed a lot less impressive curled up on the floor, groaning in pain.

Sam walked up to him and squatted down. He put a finger under the angel’s chin and forced him to look up. His eyes were filled with anger and hate and Sam couldn’t resist the shudder of excitement at seeing that. Oh, he was going to enjoy this.

“There really is no need for that, uh…” He made a pause, but the angel didn’t offer his name.

“Jimmy,” Dean said from somewhere behind him. “That’s what he was calling himself.”

“Alright, we’ll go with that.” Sam shrugged.

He gave his brother a quick glance only to see what he already know: Dean had the blade in his hand and he was ready to react should the angel try anything else. Which he didn’t seem to want to do right now. He was smart, despite having got himself captured by the enemy.

“If you’re going to kill me, just go ahead and do it.”

He was also feisty. Sam really, really liked this new toy.

“You really think I went through all of that trouble just to kill you?” Sam chuckled and moved away from him.

He sat on his throne and made Dean a gesture so he would step away from the angel. His brother’s face was a mask of barely restraint anger. The angel looked at him as he staggered to his feet and then back at Sam.

“Then, why did you bring me here?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“I have a proposal for you,” Sam said, leaning back against. “Work for me.”

Confusion flashed through the angel’s eyes for a second, for a fraction of a second, before he got his emotions under control again.

“What do you mean?” he asked still.

“I mean, I know Heaven is gearing up to attack my kingdom,” Sam explained. “I know they don’t like that I’ve taken over and they would see me deposed. For the first time in ages, Heaven and Hell are going to war.”

The angel tilted his head. If he was shocked by what Sam was telling him, he did a good job at not showing it, though Sam was certain this was the first time he would be hearing about it. An angel that was stationed on earth with the mission to save human’s souls couldn’t possibly know what the higher-ups were up to. Sam was counting on that.

“So, work for me,” he continued. “You can tap into their wavelength, can’t you? You can hear them. You know their strategies and how they work…”

“I am simply a servant of humanity,” the angel said. There was no feigned modesty or pride in his voice. He was stating a fact. Sam wondered if all angels were this dry or if it was just this one.

“You still know more than we do,” he insisted. “And with you, we’ll be prepared to counter whatever it is that they’re planning.”

The angel threw his head back.

“Never.”

Sam sighed.

“I wasn’t expecting you to say any different,” he admitted. “However, we have means to persuade you.”

“You’ll have me tortured?” For the first time, the angel showed a glimpse of humor as he said this. “Go ahead. Nothing is going to make me change my mind. Nothing you do to me will be worse than Heaven’s punishment if I betray them.”

The answered managed to surprise Sam. He was definitely not expecting this to be easy, but he didn’t think the angel would outright mock their capacity to convince him to work for them.

“So you fear them more than me? More than us?” Sam asked, turning his head towards Dean. His brother shrugged. It was obvious he didn’t think it mattered how they convinced him, as long as they did and that was a position that Sam could definitely agree with. “Well, I think that’s a mistake on your part, but far be it from me to deprive you of the chance of finding out for yourself.”

He snapped his fingers and Dean moved to grab the angel by the arm. In a single, fluid movement, the shackles were back on his wrists.

“Have at him, Dean,” Sam instructed. “Lilith can wait for later.”

A smirk curved Dean’s lips up. He pulled from the angel to guide him towards the door. He followed Dean with the dignity of a prince: his head held high, his shoulders squared. Sam really, really liked him. Maybe later he would go down to the dungeons to watch Dean work. It was always amazing to see.

Ruby and Meg were both standing next to the wall.

“Ruby,” Sam called. “Go make sure that Lilith is where I left her. Then go wait for me in my chambers.”

Ruby bowed her head obediently and headed for the door.

Meg took a step to follow her.

“I don’t remember having dismissed you, Meg.”

Meg immediately turned towards him. Sam caught a glimpse of her snout, of the blackness in her eyes, but they disappeared almost immediately. She knew she had to keep the appearances up in front of him.

“Apologies, my lord.”

Sam made a gesture for her to come closer.

Meg was a puzzle that Sam hadn’t finished putting together. If he had to point at a favorite consort, he would have had to say it was her. She wasn’t a snake like Lilith or a doormat like Ruby. She was the daughter of the previous king, though she’d never clarified what that meant exactly. Had he created her? Had she been his daughter before they went to Hell? All Sam knew was that she had been the previous king’s attack dog for enough millennia that a lot of other demons on Hell would’ve followed her if she’d tried to take over the throne.

But, for whatever reason, she hadn’t. She’d bowed her head and come to his bed willingly, but there was a sharpness about her, a spark in her eyes that let him know that she would never fully submit. She spoke up when she thought he was making a mistake and though Sam sometimes had her sent to the dungeons for it, sometimes he actually listened to what she had to say. She was astute, he gave her that, and precisely because of that, he didn’t trust her either.

The only one he trusted completely, blindly, was Dean. But keeping Meg around also had its advantages.

He patted his lap and Meg immediately climbed on top of it.

“I like this outfit,” he commented. When in her human skin, Meg usually showed herself to be wearing form-fitting jeans and a blouse, not too discreet, but not too risqué either. This time, however, she’d presented herself in a very short skirt and a tube shirt that adhered to her skin adorably.

“I used it to honeytrap the angel,” she confessed.

“You caught him?” Sam asked, rising an eyebrow.

“Dean helped, of course.”

She’d spoken too fast and too loud for him to believe her. He placed a hand on the small of her back and watched her face closely until she shifted awkwardly on top of him.

“He blew our first attempt,” she admitted in the end. “So we had to get creative.”

Sam laughed. Meg knew well enough that he didn’t like anyone talking badly about his brother, but there was really nothing she could say that would make him mad at Dean. Not in any way that mattered, of course.

“Good thing I sent you with him, then.”

His other hand travelled up her leg, delighting in the softness of it on his fingertips. As always, Meg tensed up, but then she relaxed and closed her eyes. Sam sometimes had the suspicion she faked her pleasure, unlike Ruby, who was always willing and ready to…

His hand came upon something hard and cold against Meg’s skin, tucked carefully inside of her stocking.

“What’s this?” Sam asked, grasping it before he pulled it out.

It was a weapon, but not one that he’d seen before. It was silver and the blade was pointy and triangular. It glinted in his hand, reflecting Meg’s guilty face in it.

“A souvenir from the angel. Found it inside of his coat.”

“And you decided to just keep it?”

Meg shrugged and shrunk a little, but she didn’t seem fearful. More like a child that had been caught with their hand on the cookie jar.

“I didn’t see there was anything wrong with it…”

Sam turned the blade in his hand and placed the business end of it on Meg’s neck. She flinched at its coldness touching her skin and Sam delighted a little in that fear.

“This is a very dangerous toy, Meg,” Sam said. He wasn’t angry with her, not really. But it was better to discourage her having any sorts of ideas like that in the future. “If you wanted it, you should have asked me if you could have it.”

“Right, my bad,” she said, shrugging, still trying to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. “It won’t happen again.”

“I hope it won’t.”

He kept his tone as light as hers, but he still didn’t like the fact she’d kept a weapon that could be easily used against other demons. He would have to discipline her for that. Not as severely as Lilith, of course, but it couldn’t go unpunished.

He grazed her cheek with the tip of the blade, slowly sliding it down her deceitfully unblemished skin. She was a master at keeping her true nature hidden, most demons were. But Sam knew exactly what lied underneath.

He nicked the skin right above her breasts. Meg yelp and jumped a little, but Sam kept her firmly in his arms, watching the black blood trickle down. His mouth watered, but he held back. There was no need to rush this.

Ruby enjoyed this. She enjoyed the pain of the knife on her skin and the bloodletting. She curled up with a pleasure so genuine when Sam’s mouth found her body and he drunk from her. Maybe that was why she was always so willing.

He didn’t know what Lilith thought of it. He would have been very stupid to let her be around him in a moment when he was so vulnerable, so focused on what he had right in front of him. Even when he had no more remedy than to torture her, he made sure not to spill her blood or that he’d had enough of a fix right before.

Meg, though… Meg always recoiled, she always flinched. She didn’t protest, but it didn’t excite her like it did with Ruby. In a way, it must have been humiliating for her to have to do what he told her to, to be used this way, when she’d been so powerful in the past.

And that was what Sam enjoyed, what he reveled in as he lowered his mouth and run his tongue up and down the superficial wound. He enjoyed to have this power over her, knowing she didn’t like it but there was nothing she could do about it. She was the perfect combination of obedient and rebellious and that drove him crazy.

Demon’s blood was thick as velvet in his mouth. Sam loved the way it thrummed inside of his veins, the way it filled him up with strength, with a wild energy that he could barely contain. No liquor had ever been so sweet, no drug so exhilarating. Meg squirmed, but he just tightened his arms around her body as he drunk, his heart thumping in his chest so loud it drowned out all other sound. When the wound healed, he used the angel blade to open another, again and again until Meg was limp in his arms and he was filled and satisfied.

“You taste so good,” Sam breathed.

Meg had her head thrown back and her hands hanging from his shoulders. When she moved her head back towards him, her lips were opened and her eyes were entirely black. Sam didn’t think she did that on purpose. It was hard for demons to keep control of their appearance when they were excited like that.

Maybe she enjoyed it more than she let herself admit. The thought was enticing.

“I’m glad I could please my king,” she said, her hands travelling down his chest.

There was a light tone of sarcasm in her tone that Sam didn’t care for. He pushed her down from his lap with such suddenness that Meg yelped. She fell on her knees in front of him.

“That’s what you’re good for,” he told her, running his fingers across her cheek, in a mockery of a caress. “You need to remember that, Meg.”

“Oh, you and Dean never let me forget.”

Sam could have made a quip about how she needed to learn her place, but his body had other needs. Demon blood always had that effect on him. So, he decided to show her. He buried his hand on her hair and pulled her closer.

“Use your mouth,” he ordered.

As Meg unzipped his pants to do just as he’d told her, Sam leaned back on the throne with a sigh.

It was good to be king.


	4. Chapter 4

Castiel evaluated the situation quickly. He didn’t have all that many options, really, but assessing what he was going to do, what was going to happen to him, still gave him some illusion of control.

He’d met the King of Hell and he’d proven to be as formidable as his legend. He wasn’t a demon, not truly. The rumors in Heaven was that Lucifer’s herald had marked him and fed him demon blood in the crib and that was where his powers had come from. He had been raised to rule over demons without being one himself and the fact he was sitting on the throne had been very bad news indeed.

Then there was his brother. Castiel eyed Dean as he half-pushed him, half-dragged him down a spiraling staircase. He had expected him to be a powered-up human, like Sam, but if he focused his view well enough, he could see the corrupted soul right underneath his skin. He was a demon, for sure, even though that made no sense. Demons were made by corrupting and torturing the human soul and it took years. Sam hadn’t been sitting on the throne long enough for his brother to have become a demon like this.

The Mark in his forearm had to do something with it, no doubt.

They reached the end of the stairs and Dean gave him a shove.

“Less staring and more walking, feathers.”

Castiel clenched his jaw and refused to answer to the taunt. If he was going to get out of there, his only chance to do it was to keep his head cool.

Dean pushed him down a row of dungeons at both sides of the hall. The doors were rusty and dark, with bars on them. Castiel could hear the moans and screams coming from inside them as they walked past them, people screaming out in agony, calling out for God to deliver them.

He resisted the urge to answer to those pleas. If he had the chance to escape… and this was already a very remote chance…

Dean opened a cell door and pushed Castiel through it.

“Prepared especially for you, angel,” he said, mockingly.

Castiel could see that. The walls were covered with Enochian symbols similar to those in his shackles, meant to weaken him and preventing him from flying away. There was a St. Andrew’s cross in the middle of the room, standing inside a circle with even more runes and spells.

Sam had been planning this for a while. Castiel wondered where he’d managed to find the runes and who’d designed the spells, because he was certain there were certain sections of Heaven that would die to have a place like this to stick disobedient angels in.

Perhaps that was what he deserved, after all.

The door closed with a thump and Dean moved a latched, also marked with symbols, to made sure it stayed that way.

They were locked away, alone and Castiel was at a disadvantaged.

Dean Winchester knew this. A dark smile appeared on his lips.

“Are you ready for round two?”

“Is it really a round two if I don’t have my weapon?” Castiel asked. He wasn’t trying to be smart, but he was not going to let Dean fool him or himself about what this was.

Dean moved closer to him. Castiel knew he had his blade hidden somewhere inside of his jacket, but he didn’t reach for it. Instead, he balled up his fist.

Castiel knew what was going to happen before it did and if he hadn’t been shackled and weakened by the spells, maybe he would have managed to avoid it.

Not here, though. Not now.

The pain was sudden enough that the air escaped his lungs. He doubled over and had no time to recover before Dean drove his knee up to hit him on the same exact spot again. On Heaven, or even earth, those hits would have been nothing. He would have been able to shake them off, to straighten up his back and fight Dean with all his might.

Here, he just fell on his hands and knees. He tried to crawl away from the demon, but he wasn’t letting up. He kicked him in the stomach again, so hard that Castiel felt something rupturing deep inside his skin. He could barely move and there was a metallic flavor on his mouth. It almost surprised him when he opened it and felt the blood dripping down his chin.

It was such a human thing, to bleed, to ache. He’d never done it before, despite the ages he’d spent trapped inside that flesh, that vessel. Even the pain he’d experienced after the demons had poisoned him had been dull in comparison to the hot, white flashes that went through him every time another of Dean’s kicks landed on his stomach, on his hands, on his face, on every part of his body he could reach.

He didn’t know how to react to it. His thoughts were all scattered and his grace, the very essence that burned in the center of his being, hummed and tried to break through his skin, tried to escape this flesh it couldn’t fix anymore, to spare him from the suffering.

But it seemed like Sam had anticipated even that, because the moment he instinctively tried to escape, something yanked his grace, pushing it deep inside him again, with such force that it made him dizzier than any of the hits. He fell on his side, trying uselessly to catch his breath. His vision was blurry, but he could make out the outline of Dean’s shoes standing right next to his face.

The demon knelt in front of him. His eyes were black and his smile had grown wider. He’d enjoyed this.

He grabbed unto a handful of Castiel’s hair and pulled him up. Every muscle in the angel’s vessel protested that movement, but just as before he was unable to stop it when Dean’s face practically came up to him.

“Had enough already?” he asked, with a chuckle. “But we’ve barely even started!”

His fist crashed against Castiel’s face. There was a crushing sound that echoed through Castiel’s ears and the room was suddenly spinning. It took a moment or two to center himself again enough to realize Dean was pulling him up and dragging him towards the cross. He tried to make his body limp, but the demon paid no mind as he grabbed one of his arms and shackled it to one side, then the other.

By the time Castiel realized what was going on, Dean had already secured the shackles around his feet as well and stepped back to contemplate him.

“This would be so much easier for you if you just said yes to my brother,” he commented, tilting his head a little.

Castiel spat a ball of saliva and blood at his feet.

“Why do you…?” he started, but he felt a stabbing through his ribs as he forced the words out of his mouth. He had to stop and take in deep gulps of air before he could continue: “What difference does it make to you?”

“Honestly? None.” Dean shrugged as he came closer to him. His hands found the lapels of Castiel’s shirt and without any sort of delicacy, he pulled it open. The buttons flew in every direction, leaving Castiel’s bruised chest exposed. “I always wanted to torture me an angel. Humans, demons, monsters… I’ve had enough of those. I want to find out what makes _you_ tick.”

There was a sort of sick elation in his voice. He searched inside of his pocket and took out the First Blade. The first weapon used to kill a man. How had Dean Winchester found it, how he’d become strong enough to use it, those were questions Castiel didn’t have an answer to.

All he knew was that this was a very dangerous thing, in the hands of a very dangerous creature. Dean’s smile was almost maniacal as he waved it in front of Castiel.

“But if you just say yes to him, Sammy will be happy.”

“Why would I care about making him happy?”

“It’ll make your life easier, is all.”

Castiel focused his gaze on him. They really had no idea, did they? Of the things Heaven was capable of, of what they would do to him if he broke down. His exile on earth was nothing compared to the pain Naomi could inflict, of what she would instruct they’d do to him. If he was going to be tortured anyway, he would take his chances with this demon.

Because he could escape this. He didn’t know how yet, but he was confident he could still find a way. If he was dragged to Heaven as a traitor, he would never see the light again.

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” Dean said. He dragged the tip of the blade down Castiel’s chest, touching every one of his ribs as he went along. “All the better for me.”

He plunged the blade inside of his stomach, right underneath his sternum. Castiel choked down a scream, more of surprise than out of pain, as the pain once again went through him, electric and burning this time. The Blade was different: it didn’t just rip through his body, his flesh. It reached deep inside him, as cruel as Dean’s hands themselves, as it twisted and carved through him.

The angel’s entire body was on fire, breaking, even before Dean pulled back the knife.

With a whimper that he couldn’t hold back, Castiel looked down. It almost didn’t surprise him to see the white, glowing substance that was his grace, dripping down from the wound. It was light as air, curling and dropping to the ground like puffs of smoke that turned into droplets of something more akin to water.

It froze him. The proud stubbornness he’d maintained while Dean and Meg dragged him to hell, the bravado he’d shown in front of the Boy King, even his resolution not to break under Dean’s fists, were all crashing down now. It hurt more than he’d anticipated, like acid on his skin.

He’d not thought that they would be able to do this. He was ready, he was prepared for them to torture his body, even to try and infect his mind, but he had not anticipated they could reach his grace, the very thing that made him who he was. That they could rip it away from him like this.

Dean watched it with fascination in his pitch black eyes.

“Huh. I think I went a little deeper than I should have,” he commented, but he sounded amused than anything else. “We’re gonna save that for the grand finale, what do you say, big boy?”

Instead of waiting for Castiel to give him an answer, he stabbed through the angel’s arm with such force it finally tore a scream out of him.

Dean nodded, approvingly.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun, you and I. Just you wait!”

* * *

Dean was not like the torturers in Heaven. Naomi and her ilk were all clinically precise, working with needles and drills, instruments meant to reprogram, to dig deep into an angel’s psyche and change it.

The Knight of Hell had no qualms about anything like that. His only objective was to inflict as much pain, as deeply as he could. He used knives, saws, chains, anything that could be used to cut, curve and dig into the angel’s body until it was bloodied and bruised beyond recognition. His own hands and feet could be just as terrible though, and Castiel had to use every inch of his willpower not to flinch when he saw Dean’s fists curling up in balls, ready to strike.

He didn’t use the Blade again. There were two reasons for that that Castiel could figure out. On one hand, the angel was of no use to Sam without his powers, so Dean needed to compromise his grace as little as possible. On the other, it was much more convenient to him if, at the end of each session, Castiel could heal himself anew.

“I’m never getting tired of this. You’re like my very own kinetic sand, angel,” Dean commented every time. He cut into Castiel’s skin slowly, drawing out his knife over it almost like a sharp caress. It broke and bled, but soon after his grace was glowing, doing everything in its power to fix the vessel. “How bad do you think I can damage you before you can’t bounce back?”

Castiel was not eager to discover the answer to that question, but there had been times when he though Dean had managed to achieve it. Times when he could feel his grace waning, when he’d woken up still feeling pain or exhaustion. The time Dean had systematically cut the tip of every one of his fingers had been one such occasion. Castiel wasn’t sure how long it’d taken, but when he’d woken up after what felt like years of darkness, his fingers had regrown and he was complete again.

Time moved different in Hell and Castiel was often disoriented, wondering how long it had passed. Weeks? Days? Months? It stretched out forever and of course, he had no hope that anyone up there had noticed his absence. And if they had, they wouldn’t risk attacking Hell before it was time just to rescue one angel that had got himself captured because he’d lowered his guard for a pretty face and a kiss.

If he wanted to get out of that place, he would have to do it himself.

It was easier said than done, of course. His grace kept acting, trying to keep his vessel together and him alive, but the Enochian spells that covered the walls were still making him too weak to manifest his wings or any other sort of power.

Dean visited him often, but it must not have been enough, because one day, Sam himself walked through the door along with his brother. Castiel had been lying on the floor, waiting for his torturer to return and he barely raised his head when he heard the door opening.

“What exactly are you doing here, Dean?” the Boy King asked.

Castiel sat up and held his gaze. His body didn’t bear any of the scars of what Dean did to him, but his clothes did. With the days, his suit and tan coat had become merely bloodied rags, that clung to his body crusty and dirty. He couldn’t fix them with his grace, as that would’ve been a waste of the little power he still had, but he kept them on him nonetheless as a weak attempt to retain some dignity. He must have made for a very sorry spectacle, but Sam’s face showed no emotion when analyzing him.

Except, perhaps, for a little irritation.

“Exactly what you told me to,” Dean replied. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. He seemed annoyed at the fact his brother didn’t believe him. “I’m trying to break him.”

“It’s never taken you this long to break somebody.”

“I never had anybody like him on my rack.”

“He can hear the both of you,” Castiel protested, tired that they were talking about him as if he wasn’t present. “And you won’t break me, no matter what you do. I will never help you.”

Sam’s lips quivered, though it was impossible to tell if he as amused or angered by Castiel’s intervention.

“Do you really fear them more than you do us?”

Castiel grabbed unto the wall and stood up, slowly. Maybe exaggerating a little so Sam would think he was starting to be really affected by the torture. They needed to believe they still had the upper hand, after all.

“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Castiel said, dropping his voice an octave so Sam would know he was serious. “You’re never going to win this war.”

Sam’s eyes remained on him, smoldering. They were strangely hazel in tone. Castiel was expecting them to go pitch black the way other demons did, but Sam wasn’t a demon. Not entirely, at least. Not yet.

He was a man. Which meant, he could be killed.

Maybe he’d sensed those thoughts, or maybe he just didn’t want to look away first, but he raised his hand. The fist impacted straight on Castiel’s cheek, sending him tumbling down to the ground.

“We’ll see about that,” he said, before turning to Dean. “I want him broken, do you hear me? I don’t care what you have to do. Or I’ll give him to someone else.”

“Sam…” Dean started, but the Boy King was already heading out of the cell. The door closed with a thump behind him.

“Don’t feel bad, Dean,” Castiel said. “Maybe the next guy will be luckier than you.”

Dean’s fury was so patent in his face that Castiel didn’t even have time to regret it before he was up on the cross again, immobilized by the shackles.

“This has nothing to do with luck,” Dean growled in his face. “I am the best there is. If I can’t break you, no one can. Sam knows this.”

“Are you sure about that? Because it sounded to me like he was questioning your abilities just now…”

Dean pulled out his Blade from inside of his jacket, forced his fingers into Castiel’s mouth and pulled his tongue out.

“You’re so much prettier when you’re shutting up.”

The Blade made a clean, precise cut across his tongue. Castiel squirmed as the pain burned through his face, his mouth filling up with blood. If he could have screamed he would have, but all that came from his throat were some desperate, gargling sounds.

That didn’t calm Dean down. He worked so hard on him that Castiel had to wonder if he had done the right thing by provoking him. He left the cell what felt like an eternity later, abandoning Castiel in a corner of it, his body so destroyed it felt like it would be impossible to move.

But he forced himself to anyway.

He had no element to work with except his own blood and he was lucky Dean spilled it so generously. His tongue was still bleeding and it would be for a while, so he stuck two fingers inside of his mouth and got to work.

Some of the symbols Sam had painted on the walls burned when he touched them, but as soon as he crossed them out or deformed them, their effect on him loosened. Link by link, Castiel had been destroying the chains they had placed upon him, healing a bit faster, feeling a bit stronger each day. He’d been lucky that none of the brothers had noticed that he was trying to cancel out the wards. He’d been planning on waiting a bit longer to try and escape, but Sam’s visit had him concerned.

The Boy King was losing his patience and that meant that so was Dean. He couldn’t wait any longer to try and get out of there.

He sat cross-legged, his back straight against the wall and breathed in deeply, searching for the power of his grace deep inside him. Feeling its power after he had been repressing it for so long, saving it up to do precisely this.

His body heated up, but it wasn’t a painful burn like before. It was warm, healing light, his grace responding to his will with a simple command.

In the blink of an eye, his vessel was cured. When he stood up, he didn’t feel dizzy or disoriented, but strong. Stronger than he had been since Meg slipped him the poison for the first time.

The latches on the door were also marked with Enochian symbols meant to keep him in, but Castiel had come too far to give up now. He was going to escape, return to Heaven, letting them know what Sam was planning…

In front of the door, he hesitated. Return to Heaven… to be dismissed once again. To be cast out once more, forced to wander among humans, stripped from all authority and power. Because he’d dared to simply ask questions.

No. They had been right to demote him. The orders came from High Above and he should never have questioned them.

Maybe Heaven would even thankful now when he returned. When the war came, perhaps they would need him in his old station again, leading his garrison. He would take that over this, ignoring all of his old hesitations.

But it didn’t matter even if they sent him among the sinners again. He didn’t do this for the glory, but because it was his duty. His duty had been what kept him strong through Dean’s tortures and it would be what got him out of there.

His skin sizzled and reddened when he pressed his hand to the metal door, but he gritted his teeth and ignored the pain. He’d suffered worse, both on Heaven and inside that very cell. His will pushed through the door, and just like before, his grace sang in response.

The latch outside came undone with a simple click.

He stepped out, to the darkened hall, breathing in the corrupted air of Hell. He waited, but apparently Sam’s provisions had not included an alarm or any other element that would have alerted him of his escape.

There were no demons patrolling the dungeons. Perhaps they thought it would be impossible for anyone to escape. And by the screams of despair that echoed through them, the cries and sobbing, the useless pleas for mercy… perhaps they were right.

Castiel clenched his fists. He couldn’t rescue them. Maybe when he came back with his garrison, with an army backing him up…

For now, all he could do was run.

“I’ll come back,” he promised himself and the souls as he headed for the stairs.

He hadn’t counted on the obsidian palace being so big. He’d seen in the distance, after Meg and Dean had pushed him down a Devil’s Gate in a cemetery. It stood atop of a cliff, contrasting with the red blood sky, as twisted and sterile as everything around it. Hell seemed composed of infinite abysses, one deeper than the other, where anyone could fall should they took a wrong step.

He hadn’t seen much of the inside of it, though, because they had led him straight into the Throne Room, so he wasn’t sure exactly how to get out and get himself back to the Gate. He would find the way, though.

It was that or suffer some more under Dean’s blade.

He would have said a prayer, begging his Father to light his way, but he wasn’t sure God could hear him all the way down there or if he would even want to. So he simply chose a direction and followed it.

The Boy King didn’t seem to want to have a lot of his own subjects in the castle, because Castiel walked through deserted hall after deserted hall without running into any other demon, whether guard or prisoner. He looked around every corner, he stopped looking for places where to hide, but there were none: just a maze of identical halls. Perhaps the castle was designed to confuse anyone who wasn’t familiarized with its geography.

Perhaps he could find a wind to jump down from. He didn’t know if he was strong enough to fly or if Hell’s atmosphere would simply push him down into those infinite abysses, but it was better than to continue his wandering through this maddening place.

He came upon an ajar door and peered inside. He couldn’t make out much, except for what seemed to be the foot of a large bed and some tangled limbs upon it.

And on the floor next to it, abandoned and forgotten, his own angel blade. It glinted under Hell’s eternal twilight, which he could see on a wide window on the other end of the room. The tip was stained with dark demon blood.

Castiel held his breath, stood perfectly still. It was a bad idea. It was terrible, in fact. He could go on, look for another place from where to make his escape.

But he had been so long without his blade, he felt so vulnerable without it…

When he stepped into the room, he did so as silently as a shadow. The sleeping forms on the bed didn’t stir, didn’t give any sign to having heard him. Their breathing was calm and deep. Castiel made out four forms on it, limbs and skin all tangled together. The brothers were in the middle of the bed, their heads pressed together. Each one of them had an arm around a female demon at each side of the bed: Meg by Dean’s side, another brunette demon by Sam’s. Sam still had some dry blood on his lips.

It was an image of complete debauchery, of perversion. And yet, also, strangely peaceful. He had not expected demons to be able to slumber with such tranquility, as if there was nothing weighting on them.

Castiel needed to get out of there without disturbing them, he needed to leave now, immediately.

But as soon as the blade was back on his hand, he felt once again like a warrior. And a warrior wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to strike his enemy like this.

The blade could kill demons. It could kill Meg, after she had humiliated him and captured him. It could kill Dean, for all the pain he’d put Castiel through. But most importantly, it could kill Sam.

Castiel watched the spot on his chest, where the Mark of the concentric sixes was, right above his heart. Sam Winchester wasn’t a demon, he was a human who’d obtained his power through corrupted methods, who had surrendered himself to Lucifer for power and whatever pleasure he derived from this. He needed to die, and of course, that would stop the war on its tracks.

Castiel would return Heaven a hero.

He turned the blade in his hand and gripped the hilt. He raised it above his head.

There were a pair of pitch black eyes staring at him from the other end of the end. While he had been busy contemplating Sam, Meg had woken up and raised her head. She was looking at him, but she made no movement or sound to alert the others. Castiel froze and stared directly back at her. At her round face that could looks innocent, at her naked shoulders and the deceitfully smooth skin.

That brief distraction was his downfall.

The other brunette demon woke up as well and she did what he’d half-expected Meg to do: she screamed, a loud high-pitched sound that pierced though his ears without mercy.

In a second, Castiel was being ambushed by her. Her body was light, but she was agile: her hand closed around his wrist like a new shackle, preventing him from moving the blade in any significant manner.

“Get away!” she demanded. “Get away from him!”

Castiel wrestled with her, alerted now as Sam and Dean both stirred awake and also jumped up.

He was lost. But he was not going to go down without a fight.

He punched straight into the demon’s stomach, two quick hits just to get her away from him. It worked: she stumbled backwards, releasing his arm in the process. Castiel buried the blade to the hilt on her chest, right between her breasts. She let out a strangled breath as her skin flashed golden, before she dropped lifelessly to the ground.

Castiel turned towards Sam…

Dean tackled him before he could make any further movement. They rolled on the ground, with the Knight attempting to punched him and hit him, while Castiel artlessly attempted to sink the blade into whatever place he could reach.

It finally reached some flesh and Dean shouted. Castiel didn’t think he’d reached anything vital, but the blood that came flowing out between from the spot between his neck and his shoulder was so abundant it was impossible to tell for sure. Dean howled like a furious animal, but Castiel sank his knee on his stomach and got him away from his body.

Sam stood in front of him, imposing in his height, shameless in his nakedness. The man that Castiel had seen before had been impatient, but confident, almost playful even. Now, there was nothing like that in his face. There was just pure, unrestrained, rage.

A force like a hand of iron gripped him by the throat and sent him flying across the room, pinning him to the dark wall behind him. Castiel struggled and trying to use his own power against it, tried to push it away with his grace.

But Sam was stronger and ferocious as he came closer to him, his hazel eyes so dark they were undistinguishable from those of a demon.

“You killed Ruby,” he said, almost spitting the words in Castiel’s face. “You hurt my brother!” he shouted.

Castiel couldn’t answer and even if he could, he wouldn’t have known what to say. So he simply clenched his jaw and stared defiantly at the Boy King’s face. Behind him, he could still Dean’s growling, but Sam was so close to him now that he obstructed all of Castiel’s vision.

He jerked his head briefly and Castiel’s shoulder splintered with a loud “crack”. The angel shouted at the suddenness of the pain that jolted through him. He dropped to the floor, face first and a foot fell on the hand where he held the blade, grinding it mercilessly until he had no choice but to let go of it.

Sam leaned down to pick it up. The fury had remitted somehow, back into an emotionless expression that Castiel knew was nothing but a mask.

“Meg was right,” he commented. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

The invisible hand closed on his neck again, choking him, pulling something from deep inside of him. His grace screamed, a shrieking on his ears that seemed to come from deep inside him, a warning he could not heed to, because he was immobilized and weak.

The last thing he saw before his vision obscured completely was the Boy King standing in front of him, with the angel blade in hand.

* * *

He didn’t expect to wake up.

No one in Heaven really knew what happened to angels when they died, since it didn’t happen very often at all. Some theorized that they returned to the Light of the Lord, but no one had been able to confirm it. Castiel was of the belief that they simply vanished, that they ceased to be and returned to the nothingness where God had pulled them from. He couldn’t conceptualize what that was like, no one could, but he believed it might have been similar to what humans described as a sleepless dream.

Whichever the case, it was clear he was awake now. He could feel the aching of his back against a cold, hard surface, he could feel every muscle of his body slowly returning to attention.

So he couldn’t be dead. For whatever reason, Sam had had the opportunity to drive the blade through his heart and he’d chosen not to.

When Castiel opened his eyes, he saw the same dimly lit cell that where he’d been tortured before, or at the very least, one that looked just like it. The Enochian wards had been painted on the ceiling this time, out of his reach to erase or deform them, and preventing him to fly or to use his grace in any way. The circle in the middle of the room was gone and so was the cross where he’d spent innumerable hours tied up, letting Dean destroy and rebuild his body.

He was back to square one, it seemed, but Sam had taken more precautions this time.

It didn’t matter. The moment Dean walked in through that door, Castiel would be lunging himself at him. He’d failed to escape, which meant that now Sam was going to do everything in his power to prevent him from doing it again. It was best to just accept defeat and let the Knight be done with him.

So he waited.

And waited.

And kept on waiting until it became apparent that no one was coming.


	5. Chapter 5

Time in Hell moved differently.

Castiel was used to the peaceful eternity of Heaven. Time was not a worry there, because it had been excluded from the minds of those who dwelled in it.

Time on Earth was faster. Humans were always hurrying, always anxious to get somewhere, never stopping, never giving themselves a second of calm. They were aware, even if not consciously, that the time in that realm was finite, so they had to use it as much as they could.

Time on Hell was the worst combination of both of those things. Because no one expected to die there, so there was no rush. No one came to see him: Dean didn’t come back again to torture him, Sam didn’t show up to taunt him. It seemed like their new plan was to to forget about him, confine him in there for the ages. Were they trying to drive him mad? Were they hoping this isolation would make him more vulnerable to their proposal to work for them?

He couldn’t deny it was an effective plan. He could see a patch of Hell’s reddish skies through a small widow near the ceiling, but since it was never night nor day there, he couldn’t know how many days he’d spent in the cell. Since he didn’t need to eat or sleep, there was no way for him to measure how long he’d spent lying there, waiting for something, anything, to change.

He walked around the cell. He must have paced its circumference hundreds, thousands, millions of times, to the point it was a miracle to him that his steps hadn’t dug a hole on the ground. The Enochian wards on the ceiling mocked him.

The only thing he could hear for sure were the screams of the damned. In the cells all around him, he could hear their wails, their suffering, their useless prayers and their imploration, their growing insanity as sometimes they would take to repeat the same phrase over and over again until the words lost their meaning. He could hear the rattling of chains, and, every once in a while, the manic laughter of a demon enjoying themselves too much… or the laughter of a soul that was corrupted beyond salvation.

He thought about the humans he met on Earth. He’d known then, as he did now, that it was an angel’s duty to save humans, to help them avoid this sort of fate. He’d done so half-heartedly sometimes, failing to see what was it about humanity that was worth saving. Now he regretted it. He wondered how many of the souls whose shrieks and howled tormented him would have avoided that fate if he had been a humbler servant, a wiser guide. A better angel.

Maybe this was his punishment for failing his duty. Maybe he deserved all of this.

When those thoughts came over him, he would shrink in a corner, cover his ears with his hands and scream himself hoarse.

Of course, it was no use. There was nothing he could do to stop hearing them.

Sometimes, he prayed. He prayed with no hopes that anyone would be listening, he prayed to keep himself sane, or to hear anything other than the constant screaming and sounds of torture.

He would do anything for some peace and quiet, oh, how he missed the peace of Heaven now, its light. But it was just as out of reach to him as it would be for the most reprobate sinner, so he forced himself to pray instead.

“Brothers and sisters, please, hear me,” he would mutter, staring into the wards as if his gaze was enough to weaken them so his words would tap into the wavelength that all angels shared. “I am in need; I am in pain. Please, I can’t escape this alone.”

Sometimes, when he dared, he would talk to his Father, he would dare to do even that in his despair.

“If this is your plan, if this is where I am meant to be by your grace, then I will stand it all,” he said. “But please, deliver me. Save me. I don’t know if I can take more of this.”

And sometimes, of course, he would let his rage overtake him.

“Why did you allow this to happen?!” he screamed. “This isn’t my fault! If you’re all-knowing, if you’re all-mighty, then you should have left those souls in the hands of someone better! You should have cared for them, your children, whom you presume to love! You shouldn’t have abandoned us!”

“Oh, dear Lucifer, can it, will you?” a voice came from somewhere to his left. “I’m trying to get some sleep!”

Castiel startled. In all the time that had been there (and he had no idea how much it had been, but it couldn’t have been short), no one had tried to speak directly to him. And this voice sounded exasperated, irritated, but it was the first words someone had spoken to him in a very long, long time.

Perhaps that was why he held onto them anyway, desperately.

“Hello?” he called out, sitting up suddenly. “Who’s there?”

There was no answer. The voice had come from the wall across the cell, he though, so he went there and pressed his hand and his ear to the black wall.

“Please, if you can hear me…” he begged. “Please, answer me.”

Another long silence, interrupted by a distant cry followed by the cracking of a whip somewhere.

Then…

“Yes, I can hear you. That’s kind of the problem.”

It was a female voice, hoarse and low. It had sounded so different from the last time he’d heard it, but he’d recognized it immediately anyway.

“Meg?”

She didn’t say anything. Castiel didn’t really care about that.

“Of course,” he said, leaning his back against the wall and rubbing his eyes. If he had been human, he would have bet he was on the edge of having a severe migraine. Finally, someone talked to him, someone he could interact with even if it was for barely a moment… and it was her, of all the creatures that roamed the realms.

“Hey, you’re not exactly a joy to be around either!” Meg said. “I have been hearing your ramblings for three weeks and to be honest, I think they should record you and play you on repeat for the souls to hear. They would break way faster just to shut you up.”

“Weeks?” Castiel repeated. That made no sense. He would understand if another demon had been in the cell next to his torturing someone nonstop, though the screaming he’d heard lately seemed to come for further away.

But Meg? She was a concubine, someone Sam trusted. Why would she be in a cell? Unless…

Unless she was being punished too.

“What did you do?” he asked.

Of course, she refused to answer to such a direct question.

“I’m surprised you’re still alive, Clarence,” she commented. “I though Sam and Dean for sure put you down like a lame horse.”

“Clarence?” Castiel repeated. “That’s not my name.”

“Neither is Jimmy, and to be honest, you don’t look like a Jimmy,” Meg replied.

Castiel had no idea what any of that meant.

“Anyway, how are you enjoying Hell’s hospitality?”

It was a joke. It had to be. Even so, Castiel couldn’t help but to answer:

“It’s Hell.”

“Yeah.” Meg’s laughter echoed through the cell. “That’s kind of the point.”

Castiel fell on his side and curled up again with a sigh.

“Ah, come on! Lighten up a little,” Meg said. Castiel could almost picture her, sitting in the same position as him, her back against the wall and her legs pressed to her chest. “It’s not like we’re going to be here forever… oh, wait.”

“Do you find pleasure in tormenting me?” Castiel asked, more annoyed than anything else as she laughed again.

“I’ll take my pleasure where I can get it,” Meg replied. Her voice was the sounding equivalent of a shrug. “It’s not like I have HBO here. Man, I really miss television. Whenever I go topside, I try to catch up with all the shows I’m missing, but there never seems to be enough time.”

Castiel was surprised. Not because Meg would indulge in something as innocent as television, but because… well, he had too.

“I enjoy this cartoon about a coyote chasing a road runner,” he told her. “I find it funny how it represents humanity, endlessly chasing the divine, without being able to catch it. Have you seen it?”

“You know, Dean was right,” she commented. “You are so much cuter when you’re shutting up.”

Castiel felt a phantom pain in his tongue, from the time Dean had cut it. He shuddered at the memory, even if his grace had managed to fix it. He wondered what would have happened if Dean had cut something bigger, like any of his limbs. Would he have been able to regenerate it? Would it have caused the permanent damage Dean had been looking after?

He couldn’t decide whether that or this isolating was worse.

Meg’s voice came again to save him from those gloomy thoughts.

“I didn’t mean that, angel,” she said. “Talk to me about your stupid cartoons. Hell, talk to me about anything. I am bored out of my mind here and I imagine so are you. How long has it been? Three years, five?”

“It couldn’t have been that long,” Castiel said, frowning. That didn’t sound right. Could it possibly…?

“Time is weird here,” Meg said. “It might as well have been.”

“How do you know that you’ve been stuck there for weeks then?”

There was a short pause.

“Touché,” she admitted in the end. “I hadn’t seen you for some time, is what I meant. You’ve been trapped here all along?”

“Yes. I don’t know where else I would have been.”

“You know, that sounds very typical of Sam,” she commented. “When he gets tired of someone, he just locks them away and forgets about them. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Lilith in a while either.”

“Is that what he did to you, too?”

That question was met with a long silence. Castiel didn’t think it was possible, but his cell felt even lonelier than before. It was all the time he’d spent being so isolated, he realized. It had nothing to do with Meg being a great conversationalist or him finding common ground with her all of the sudden. He still remembered her poisoned kiss, the cold of her dagger cutting through his skin.

But she was better than anyone.

“Meg?” he called out. “You don’t have to tell me what you did.”

“I did nothing,” Meg replied. She sounded annoyed. “That’s kind of the problem.”

“I don’t think I understand,” he said, frowning again. Maybe he was just confused because he didn’t understand Hell’s culture or something.

“Sam doesn’t trust Lilith and well, you killed Ruby,” Meg pointed out. “So when he needs his demon blood fix now, is either me or Dean. And when Dean is busy torturing souls, as he is, then I have to be the tap. And I’m not exactly a fan. So I just lay back and think of England when that happens. Sam didn’t care for that.”

Castiel still didn’t understand what was exactly the problem, but he said nothing. He suspected he wasn’t going to understand it even if Meg explained it to him.

“For sure he could get other… concubines, is that what you’re called?”

“I guess. But no. The only reason he took me and Lilith was because we were big shots in here. Lilith is old, maybe the oldest demon there is. Rumor has it Lucifer himself created her and she never bothered to dispel that. In any case, she was respected. Well-liked, as much as demons can like each other anyway. So that was why Sam had to keep her under control.”

“And you?”

There was another pause.

“You remember that pretty Throne Room we took you to when you first arrived?” Meg asked. “That used to belong to my father.”

“Your father?” Castiel repeated. “Was he really your father?”

“He pulled me down from the rack. He _chose_ me to be his daughter,” Meg replied. “I loved him and I would have done anything for him.”

This confused and surprised Castiel in equal parts. He never believed that demons could experience emotions like gratitude, or loyalty, or love. No, it couldn’t be love, he decided. It had to be sick, twisted version of it. That was the only thing demons truly knew.

“But he was also a fanatic,” Meg continued. “When Sam arrived, bearing Lucifer’s mark on his chest, my father gladly stepped down. He let Sam killed him because he believed in Lucifer over anything else. And his last instructions to me was that I was to serve the new king as well as I had served him. So, here we are.”

There was a thump on the other side of the wall. Castiel imagined her resting her head against the wall.

“I could have raised an army. I could have joined forces with Lilith when she offered me to. We could have opposed Sam’s ruling, but now, with Dean here…”

“What’s Dean has to do with it?”

“Well, I believe you found yourself on the wrong side of his blade, didn’t you?” Meg laughed, bitterly. “You know what he’s capable off.”

Castiel winced at the memories, his hand running over the spot in his stomach where he’d used the First Blade.

“Sam was a weak king. I knew it from the moment he got here. The only reason he was powerful was because Ruby had instructed him how to use the demon blood powers to his advantage, but he isn’t a demon like us. And he hates us. And some of them thought, well, maybe an actual demon should sit on the throne, you know? So some were getting uppity. But then Dean arrived. He couldn’t handle his brother becoming the ruler of Hell, he couldn’t handle not being able to see him again. So he went looking for a way to become a demon that wouldn’t involve him dying and enduring years of torture like the rest of us.”

“Is there such a way?” Castiel asked. He’d never heard of anything like that.

“We didn’t believe it either, but it turned out, he was able to locate Cain. Yes, that Cain,” she added before Castiel’s disbelief even had time to settle. “He convinced him to share his Mark with him, to reveal the location of the First Blade. Then he killed him and came to Sam, turned into a proper Knight of Hell. And he made an example of all their enemies. There was this guy, Crowley… I’d never seen anyone skinned so artfully, and you can believe that I’ve seen some stuff in all my years here.”

Her voice had a drop of admiration in it, like even though she was unhappy with all of that, she couldn’t help but to admit that Dean was very adept at his job.

“And now Sam is stronger and Dean is his attack dog. One would have to be insane to try anything against them. I mean, Lilith is. That’s why she keeps trying.”

Castiel listened attentively. He didn’t know if all of this information would be useful to Heaven’s army, or even if he would have the chance to ever get it to them. That must have been the reason Meg was telling him all this to begin with. They both knew it didn’t matter how little or how much he knew about the brothers and how they’d come to power in Hell.

“And you don’t try anymore? To oppose him, I mean.”

“I’m not suicidal,” she said, simply. “Well, most days I’m not. But even when I am, Sam won’t kill me. So I can get away with some things.”

“You couldn’t get away with… thinking of… England,” Castiel pointed out, still not sure what she’d meant by that.

She laughed. It wasn’t a taunting sound like before, though. It almost sounded amused.

Or maybe that was Castiel’s wishful thinking. Maybe he wanted to believe that Meg was enjoying this conversation, if only because then it would last just a little bit longer.

"You know what my real issue is?" she asked. "It's that I actually thought the bastard cared about me, once upon a time. I mean, I knew I had to share him with Ruby, because she was the one who taught him how to be who he is, but I didn't care. He would listen to my advice, he would choose me over and over. It wasn't difficult to follow my father's last order, because Sam would at least pretend he cared about me."

"And what happened?"

"Dean showed up." There was resignation in her tone. "I can't compete with that. No one could. I belong to Sam... but he and Dean belong to each other. Do you get what I mean?"

Castiel nodded, then remembered that Meg couldn't see him.

"I understand."

"Do you, Clarence?" she said. "Do you have any idea what is like to want to have someone all on your own and not being able to do it?"

Castiel took a few seconds to think about it.

"Not really," he confessed in the end. "That sort of relationship... the sort of relationship you have with Sam, I mean.... that's discouraged in Heaven."

"What, you can't fuck anyone?"

"Well, on Earth and... here, I believe, we have vessels, bodies. In our true form in Heaven, we're just wavelengths of celestial intent."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"We don't have anything that would... lend itself to that sort of activities," he said, stuttering over the best way to explain it to Meg.

"You don't have junks," Meg repeated and she laughed again, sharply this time. "Damn, I used to think angels had a pretty sweet deal, getting to live in the eternal light and whatnot. Now I'm not so sure."

Castiel experienced a strange emotion, one he wasn't sure he liked. His cheeks were burning hot and he suddenly wish he hadn't mentioned that issue to Meg at all. It was like the shame he'd felt when he'd been called before the Host to answer for his behavior, but somehow lesser.

Embarrassment? Was this what embarrassment felt like?

"Hey, but on Earth, I'm sure all those lost girls you were trying to save threw themselves at you for free," Meg continued. "So, that must have been oodles of fun for you."

Castiel didn't answer. His embarrassment - if that was what it was - only grew.

"Clarence?" Meg asked after he'd been quiet for a while. "You did fuck someone in all the time you spent on Earth, didn't you?"

"It's forbidden."

"Oh, Lucifer." Meg's laughter was downright cruel this time.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” Castiel said, hiding his face between his hands.

“It’s funny!” she said, between chuckles. “And you know… you have such an attractive vessel, too.”

It wasn’t the first time that someone had told him that, but Castiel wondered what was the purpose of her bringing it up now.

“If I was on that cell with you, I’m sure we could find some ways to keep ourselves entertained,” she said. Her voice dropped an octave and when she spoke again, it was breathy and interrupted now and then by moans: “You know what I’d do? I’d rip that holy accountant suit you’re wearing… and I would, ah… suck you off until you’re hard and ready… and then I would just… ride you for hours…”

Castiel turned away from the wall, uncomfortable.

"Why am I talking to you?" he asked, irritated.

"I guess for the same reason I'm talking to you," she replied, amused. “We have nothing better to do down here.”

That was a very strong point, but Castiel wasn’t in the mood to concede it.

“You really think they would have known if you’d got up to any naughty business on Earth?” she asked after a few moments. “In Heaven, I mean.”

“Of course they would have,” Castiel said, but even as the words came out of his mouth, there was a twinge of doubt in his words.

For the most part, Heaven hadn’t really paid attention to him or what he did. Castiel knew he had a quota of souls to save, but for the most part, no one seemed very interested in keeping track over if he was actually achieving this or not. Even when he was supposed to report himself, they only checked if he was still on Earth, not what he was doing in it.

But then again, Naomi had been inside of his head enough times that Castiel didn’t doubt she would have a way to track him even if he hid away to… do things Heaven wouldn’t necessarily approve of.

The logical conclusion of that line of thinking, though, was…

“So they know you’re here,” Meg said, expressing the words that Castiel hadn’t really dared to say. “They just don’t care.”

“I’m a lowly soldier,” Castiel said. “I’m not of import.”

He hadn’t meant to sound as resentful as he did. Of course he wasn’t worthy of Heaven’s attention, not after what he’d done.

“Bullshit,” Meg called out. “You might be a soldier, but you’re not lowly. I saw the way you confronted Sam and Dean. That takes guts.”

Castiel hadn’t thought about his failed attempted escape since he had been thrown in that cell. Mostly because that also would’ve caused him a sense of deep embarrassment. If he had just run away… if he hadn’t let his pride rule him and convince him he could take out Sam in a single blow…

A memory crossed his mind. A pair of pitch black eyes staring at him from the other end of the bed, a flash of a naked female body…

“You… you were going to let me kill him,” he understood suddenly. “If Ruby hadn’t stopped me… you would have just…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You saw me. You saw what I was going to do and…”

“You must be confused, Clarence,” Meg said. Her tone was forceful and full of warning. “I didn’t see anything.”

She was lying through her teeth, but there was nothing Castiel could really do to get her to admit the truth.

“Do you hate him that much?” he asked anyway.

Meg didn’t answer. Of course, she wasn’t going to admit it outright. Castiel was beginning to see that perhaps loyalty was as important to demons as it was to angels.

What a strange thought.

“I don’t hate him,” Meg said, after a while. “That’s precisely the problem. I don’t hate him; I don’t even need him to love me. I just want him to be _mine_. I haven’t had anything that was truly mine since my father died.” She huffed. “Of course, I don’t expect you to understand that.”

Castiel would have been lying if he said he did. But he’d spent enough time around humans to believe that Meg was closer to them than he’d expected her to.

“If he doesn’t make you happy, then why do you keep… indulging him?”

“Didn’t you hear anything I just said?” Meg shot back. She sounded annoyed now. “He’s Lucifer’s chosen.”

“Do you believe that’s true?” Castiel asked. “Do you believe there is a Lucifer and that he created all of you? That he sent a boy named Sam Winchester to be your ruler?”

“Ruby believed it. That’s why she went looking for him and let him drink her blood in the first place,” Meg said. “My father believed it too.”

“But do _you_?”

Meg didn’t answer for such a long time that Castiel began to think his questions had irritated her too much for her to answer.

“I used to,” she said in the end, lowering her voice, like she was admitting something shameful. Castiel couldn’t imagine what something like that could be for a demon. “I really did believe in him, almost as much as my father did. Now… I’m not so sure. Maybe my mistake was to let him know that.”

He could definitely understand that.

“I had questions,” he told her. He didn’t know why. Probably because he was half-convinced he was going to die, or worse, be forgotten there for the rest of eternity. He wanted someone to know this about him, even if it was someone who wouldn’t really care for that, like Meg. “I had doubts. Just like you, I used to believe there was a God, that everything that happened on Heaven and Earth and even here, were all his will and we were all playing our part in a plan that had been perfectly laid out in front of us. But then, I… I started wondering if that was right. Do you know how many angels claim to have seen God?”

“All of you?”

“Four,” Castiel replied. “Four angels. I wasn’t told much, just what I needed to know at all times, and I started asking if those orders really came from God or from… someone else.”

“I can’t imagine that went well with your higher-ups.”

“That was why I was stationed on Earth among the sinners, with the impossible task of saving them,” Castiel explained. “And well… you see how that turned out for me.”

“So what you’re saying is, we should have both kept our mouths shut and just do what we were told.”

“I don’t know about you,” Castiel said. “But I truly wish I had kept those doubts to myself.”

Meg stayed quiet, perhaps thinking about what Castiel had told her.

“But you do believe in… him,” she said. Of course, demons couldn’t pronounce God’s name without choking. “I heard you calling out to him.”

“I call out to him for the same reason I’m talking to you. I need to believe someone is listening to me, lest I will lose what’s left of my sanity here.”

“Yeah. I get that,” she replied.

The silence returned, but this time it didn’t feel as heavy or as thick. Just knowing that Meg was on the other side of the wall and that he could talk to her, even if they were enemies… even if, outside of that shared captivity, they would try to kill one another again…

“Thank you.”

“For?”

“Listening to me,” he said. It was strange, but then again, as Meg had said, things were very strange where they were. “Talking with me. Even if it was only because you had nothing better to do.”

She said nothing. Castiel once again thought she was done with him, but after a while, he heard her again:

“Damn, Clarence. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

* * *

He heard it sometime later, when they came for her. The heavy steps on the floor, the creaking of the door.

“Sam wants to see you,” Dean’s voice called and Castiel jumped slightly at it.

“What, he’s done fucking you now?” Meg shot back.

There were more steps and then, clear as day, a short, female scream of pain. Castiel sat up in his cell, but he had to remind himself there was nothing he could do for her. She would not the same for him, if the roles were reversed.

There was some selfishness to it, too. He didn’t want Dean to remember he existed and how much fun he’d had torturing him. If he couldn’t be selfish in Hell…

“Just do what you’re told, bitch,” Dean said, speaking slowly, as if he wanted Meg to truly register his words. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Meg said, curtly. Her voice sounded broken. Like she was holding back a sob.

It was heartbreaking, but Castiel couldn’t explain why. She was a demon. She was evil. She didn’t deserve his compassion or his care.

But she had both of them anyway.

The door closed again and this time it was two pairs of steps that moved outside of the cell. Castiel waited to hear them fading in the distance, but, instead, there was a movement on his own door.

The vision panel, that had remained locked all that time, opened for the first time. A pair of pitch black eyes travel through the cell and fell on Castiel.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, angel,” Dean growled on the other side. “You’re lucky Sam thinks you’re better off staying there.”

Castiel stared back at those eyes, until the panel closed again. Only then, he allowed himself to curl up on the floor and shiver. Dean was still furious with him, still willing to do as many horrible things he could to him.

But it was Sam who’d planned this isolation for him. And that meant that this was a new form of torture that wasn’t stopping any time soon.


	6. Chapter 6

Meg didn't return.

No one else was put on the cell next to him. He wouldn't have been able to tell if that was on purpose or if the souls that were locked there simply couldn't hear him through the wall or if they just couldn't answer to him. He kept hearing their wails and cries, though, so Castiel started a new tactic when interacting with them.

"You're not alone," he would say. "I am here. I am with you. You're not alone."

After some time, though, the words stopped making sense and he wasn't sure anymore if he was telling them to someone else or just trying to make himself feel better. The difference vanished with the passing days.

With time, he learned how to put himself in a trance, to meditate until everything around him became unreal. He would fall into a sort of hypnotic state, repeating words and prayers that had long since become meaningless. his eyes were always staring at the unchanging, unreachable wards on the ceiling. His grace was always thrumming low in his veins. It wasn't quite sleeping, but it was the closest thing he could get to it.

He was in one of those states when the door of his cell open again one day.

At first, he wasn't sure what he was seeing right in front of his face or why, but after a few seconds his mind awoke suddenly.

It was Dean, with the same shackles that had hold him before in his hand. He wasn't smiling as he ordered him to his feet.

"You're really making my job difficult," he complained as Castiel obediently extended his wrists towards him. There was no point in submitting himself to further pain by angering him more, but Dean still kicked and shoved him out of the cell.

He didn't tell Castiel where they were going and Castiel didn't ask. He couldn't have expected a direct answer anyway. He wasn't scared, precisely, but his heart was racing inside of his chest, his grace pulsing weakly against the shackles.

Dean guided him through another spiraling staircase and they arose to one of the infinite halls of the obsidian palace.

Castiel stopped in front of a window, for maybe a second or two. From the small tall window in his cell, all he could see was a patch of red sky, but from here, his eyes took in once more the immensity of Hell. When he'd tried to escape that first time, he'd thought it was a desolate, sad landscape. Now, he found its cliffs and rocky formations nothing short of magnificent.

A part of him knew it was because this was the only variety he'd seen in a very long time, but he couldn't bring himself to care about that. He'd only wish he'd had another moment to appreciate it before Dean pushed him.

"Keep going," he ordered, sharply.

Castiel had had a lot of time to go through his memories, to find out what he'd done wrong, and they were as pristine in his mind as if he was reliving it all again. That was why it didn't surprise him to find out that Dean was taking him to the Throne Room again.

Castiel's eyes flew to Meg before anything. She wasn't on the throne, per se, but on Sam's lap. Her top was off, exposing her torso and small breasts shamelessly. They went up and down as she breathed heavily, her rosy nipples hardened despite the hot air. Sam had his mouth on her neck and a hand covering her breast. Moans of delight fell from his lips every time she moved or grinded against him.

It was so shamelessly sexual Castiel knew he should have looked away, but he couldn’t. His gaze was glued to her and he couldn’t do anything about it.

She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself quite as much as the Boy King. Her eyes were close and she was stiff between Sam’s arms, and when Dean loudly cleared his throat to announce their presence, her shoulders fell down as if she’d just let out a sigh of relief.

Sam was indifferent to those signs of discomfort or he didn’t care. He moved away and wiped a black stain in his lips.

“I’ll finish with you later,” he said, pushing her away as he stood up.

Meg found her discarded lavender shirt on the floor and put it on before stepping away towards the furthest wall of the room. She didn’t leave and none of the brothers ordered him to. Castiel shoot a look one last time at her, but she didn’t look back at him.

“Dean tells me you’re disturbing the souls. Some other torturers have complained about it as well,” Sam commented, coming closer to her. As always, his very presence demanded that everyone in the room paid attention to him. “Whispering words of encouragement to them? Making them believe there’s help coming? That can be very annoying, Jimmy.”

Castiel jolted. He’d almost forgotten his pretend name, after such a long time of no one using it.

“Their screams unsettle me,” he said, as if that was enough of a justification.

“Yes, they scream us all. That’s why I put the dungeons deep under the castle,” Sam said, rolling his eyes as if he was simply talking about a couple of annoying neighbors that argued a lot or had a noisy cat. “I was half-tempted to just put you somewhere deeper and quieter where no one would hear you. Someone you wouldn’t even hear them. Hell has many levels, angel, and throwing you down in one where no one would ever find you would be extremely easy.”

Castiel swallowed. He’d only managed to keep some semblance of sanity because of the screams and the cries, because he’d known there was still someone out there even if he couldn’t reach them or listen to them. His chat with Meg had been instrumental in not losing himself entirely even when he thought he would.

To be somewhere he wouldn’t even have that…

Sam clicked his tongue.

“Dean is of the opinion we should have just killed you.”

“Why haven’t you?” Castiel asked.

He didn’t mean to defy the king or annoy him, but that thought plagued him. If he was right and the isolation was another form of torture, he didn’t see the point of it. No one had come to offer him to join them, like Dean did at the end of every session. No one had come to make sure he hadn’t somehow ended his own life, though he wasn’t sure how he could have done something like that. He was under the impression Sam just didn’t care what happened to him anymore.

“I considered it,” Sam admitted, with a shrug. “But that would have been admitting defeat and you have no idea how much I hate losing.”

“I will never join you,” Castiel said, but there was no force behind his words and Sam received them with a roll of his eyes.

“Yes, so you keep saying. But I really think you’ve misunderstood what I’m trying to do here, angel.”

“What’s there to misunderstand?” Castiel asked, tilting his head. “You’re torturing souls, making new demons, trying to raise an army to take over the earth…”

“I don’t care about the earth,” Sam interrupted him. “You and the humans, you can have it. I was no one up there, I had nothing. Here? I’m one step removed from a god. Why would I change that? Why would I risk losing that?”

Castiel opened his mouth and closed it again. No, he couldn’t believe that. It had to be a trap, it had to be a lie. Angels had been told over and over than when Lucifer’s chosen rose, the last war for humanity would start. The one true Armageddon. Well, Sam was there and he’d taken over hell, but he had no interest in conquering earth? It didn’t make any sense.

Sam guessed what he was thinking, because he said:

“What you’ve heard of me is mostly propaganda. The souls that are coming down were already hell-bound; I didn’t move a finger to push them to sin. Some of them have committed such heinous acts that I will never allow them to come off the rack, I will never allow to become demons. Would I do that if I was raising an army?”

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that,” Castiel replied, frowning.

“No, of course I don’t,” Sam admitted. “But you have to believe it. My only interest is to keep my position in this kingdom. Why would I risk that going to war against Heaven? If there’s going to be an Apocalypse, I’m not going to be the one to start it.”

Castiel stared at him. It was impossible to read his face, to determine how sincere he was being, but his relaxed expression didn’t seem like one of a man who was lying. He turned his face towards Meg, who still stood quietly against the wall. She was looking at Sam, frowning and with her lips tightly pursed, and suddenly Castiel understood.

The reason she’d lost her faith in Sam was because he was refusing to do what he’d been put on the throne to do. He was refusing to follow Lucifer’s instruction. Meg was a demon; her father had believed in Lucifer. The Chosen One, however, was avoiding his fate by simple inaction.

It fit. Castiel didn’t believe Sam’s words, but he believed the disapproval in Meg’s face. He wouldn’t have been able to explain why. Maybe because when she’d told him this, in the bowels of the palace’s dungeons, she’d had no reason to lie.

“Heaven will come for you anyway,” Castiel determined, turning his attention back to the Boy King.

“I know. Which is why I wanted you to help me. I see now that I went about it in a wrong way.” Sam took a step towards Castiel and for a moment, the angel was sure he was going to stab him. Instead, he simply put a hand on his shoulder. “When you want a stubborn mule to move, you put a carrot in front of it and hit its rear with a stick. I gave you a stick, but I failed to give you a carrot.”

“I’m not a mule,” Castiel said. “There’s nothing you can offer me that will convince me to work for you.”

“I disagree,” Sam said. He lifted his hand and snapped his fingers.

Castiel’s shackles opened on their own volition and clattered against the floor. Sam stood back as Castiel rubbed his wrist, slightly dizzy. For the first time in a very long time, his grace was completely free and the feeling was strangely exhilarating. It filled him up with possibilities, with powers.

But he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, though. Sam had just been feeding on demon’s blood and he was way too calm, confident that there was nothing the angel could attempt to do against him that would matter.

“I can give you something you didn’t have in Heaven,” he said. “Freedom.”

“I was free in Heaven,” Castiel argued, frowning. This had to be a trick, but he couldn’t see how.

“Were you?” Sam asked. “Were you free to ask questions, to doubt?”

Meg was looking away from Castiel when he looked at her this time. He hadn’t exactly expected to keep their conversation a secret, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about her revealing something it to Sam. And how Sam was using it now against him.

“I’m not going to limit you here,” Sam said. “You can do whatever you want.”

“What if what I want is to escape your kingdom and go back to Earth?” he said. “To warn Heaven about you?”

“You can certainly do that,” Sam said. To his left, Dean groaned, making it very clear what he thought of that offer. “But I trust you won’t,” Sam continued. “I’m not going to burden you with impossible tasks. I’m not going to ask you to repress yourself, to restrain yourself. Wouldn’t you rather serve me than your absent God?”

“Why would I do that?” Castiel asked, tilting his head.

“Because we want the same thing, angel. You don’t want earth destroyed and I don’t want my kingdom disturbed. Heaven is not going to leave it alone, so… this is the way we do it. Let’s help each other out.”

He smiled, as if he’d just presented the most convincing argument he could make.

Castiel still stepped back. What he presented as the truth was tempting, but Lucifer had been the most beautiful of the four archangels. It was only logical that his Chosen One was just as charismatic.

And it didn’t matter what Castiel wanted or not. He had a duty to fulfill. He’d been created to serve Heaven, and that was precisely what he intended to do.

“No,” he said.

“Suit yourself.” Sam turned his back on him, as if Castiel wasn’t more important to him than a fly. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

He slumped back down on his throne. Castiel blinked, extremely confused now. He fully expected Dean to jump on him, put the shackles back on and drag him back to the dungeons for his refusal, but neither he nor Meg did anything.

“I’m going to escape,” Castiel warned, not sure why he was saying that. Perhaps because he wasn’t convinced Sam understood the ramifications of what he was allowing.

“I mean, you’re welcome to try and find the exit,” Sam said, with a shrug. “And if you do, I’m not going to stop you from crossing it.”

Castiel didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. What was the strategy on this, what was the catch?

Unless Sam was telling the truth and he was just uninterested in going to war with Heaven. He simply didn’t care if Castiel returned to them. He was going to defend Hell, but he had no plans to attack first.

It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

Castiel stepped back towards the door, but again, no one stopped him. Sam wasn’t even looking at him anymore: his face was turned back towards Meg.

“Did I tell you to get dressed?” he asked.

Automatically, Meg removed her shirt again and approached the throne. Sam put a large hand on the back of her head and pushed her face down to kiss her, long and possessive. Castiel was unable to take his eyes off of it, of the way in which Meg grabbed unto Sam’s neck and grinded into him as his hand went down his naked back. She moved her head down to leave a trail of kisses across his jaw and collarbone as Sam raised his head towards his brother.

“Dean?” he called, extending his hand towards him.

Dean threw one last glare in Castiel’s direction before also turning his back to him and going towards the throne. He pressed his lips to the side of Sam’s temple at the same time he wrapped an arm around Meg’s waist. He took his Blade and without much care, ran the cutting edge between her neck and her shoulder. A trail of blood bloomed on her skin.

Her moan when Sam placed his mouth over the wound sent a shiver down Castiel’s spine. He turned his heel and fled the throne room.

He felt silly. Yes, what they were doing was sinful, perverse. But he had seen many perversions while he’d walked the earth, many atrocities and sins. He’d talked with prostitutes and beggars, desperate people ready to do anything to keep their stomachs full and a roof over their heads. He’d also seen some wicked people who delighted themselves in violent pleasures, who lost themselves in debauchery and carnal satisfaction.

None of this was new to him. Perhaps the brothers’ obsession with one another, the way Dean had chosen a damned fate to stay by Sam’s side, was something he’d never seen or heard about. But it shouldn’t surprise him or affect him the way it did. They were demons. Even Sam was so full of their blood now that he was more like them than he would probably ever admit.

His mind kept going back to the scene on the throne room over and over, however. Meg’s long black hair falling down her back, the way Sam and Dean’s hands caressed her, so greedily. Her nakedness, her breasts rising and falling with her moans. He remembered how she’d teased him on the dungeons, how she’d mocked him for his lack of experience in matters of the flesh. She’d made the same sounds then. Did it mean she was faking her pleasure when she was with the king and his brother?

What would she sound like when she wasn’t?

He stopped those thoughts in their tracks. He had been isolated for too long with nothing to do but grovel and despair. That was the reason he was so fixated on her. It had to be.

He reached a window and forced himself to brush those thoughts aside. It didn’t matter. Meg’s fate didn’t concern him. He had to think about his own survival, and about Heaven’s best interest. He still didn’t believe that Sam had simply decided to let him go so he looked both ways before stepping up on the window’s ledge. He felt vulnerable without his blade, but his grace was in full power again, so he was ready to put a fight should someone try and stop him.

No one did, though. No guards, no knights, no demon came at him. The window was wide enough for him to stand on it, looking down at the dark abyss upon which the obsidian palace stood.

He breathed in the hot, heavy air of Hell and let his wings spread. They tingled and stretched, rigid, like a muscle that had been strained for too long, but after a moment and a little push from his grace, they were ready.

He jumped, his eyes closing for a second before his wings caught a stream of air and carried him away from the Boy King and his court.

* * *

Hell was bigger than he’d imagined, more complicated than he’d expected. The cliffs and rocky heights where Sam had his palace was only a small portion of it, a portion he was able to leave behind soon enough. Beyond it, he found deserts of red sand, more ruinous palaces and blasphemous churches, cracks on the earth akin to glaziers that were always smoking and rivers made not out of water, but out of a fire. He realized that the dying sun in the horizon sometimes rose and sometimes sank without ever reaching the zenith or going away completely, so the sky turned different shades of red at fixed intervals: dark crimson became his night, bright pinkish red was day.

Everywhere he went, he saw demons: some of them chained to racks and crosses like the ones where Dean had put him upon, while others worked on them with instruments of torture, others roaming free, running or entertaining themselves with large orgies that sometimes turned into impromptu carnages. There seemed to be anarchy anywhere he went: there were no armies organizing themselves, no one giving orders. Some days, he almost dared to believe that Sam had been telling the truth when he’d said that he had no plans for war.

He had been telling the truth in other instances, though. No one followed him, no one attacked him. If the demons noticed his presence, they scurried away or they became immobile, watching him like a prey caught in the stare of a hunter until Castiel past them by. In a way, it was almost lonelier than his time in the cell: the demons wouldn’t answer his questions and for the most part, they acted like he didn’t exist at all.

So finding the way out of Hell turned out to be a complicated task. He was tempted to capture one of them and torture the answers out of them, but he didn’t want to do anything that would prompt the Winchesters to come after them. The directions seemed to change and whenever he stopped to rest and trying to orient himself was useless.

He didn’t pray anymore. He was convinced no one would listen to him anyway.

He stopped one “night” atop of a new cliff he hadn’t seen before, almost convinced that he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and was somehow making his way back to the obsidian palace. He saw a pack of demons gathered around a fire and at first, he thought they were having an orgy of some type. They were all out of their human skins: their skins either impossibly black or blindingly pale, their horns and tail tangled up on one another. It took him a moment to realize that the orgy was, in fact, some sort of deranged cannibal ritual: they had pinned one of them to the ground, tore through their skin and took out their intestines out, eating them out while the devoured demon howled.

It was impossible to tell if those noises contained more pain than pleasure.

He was about to go on his way when a voice called him from behind.

“Fascinating, isn’t it, Clarence?”

Meg was perched on a rock behind him, with her legs crossed. She had her human form, that of a brown-eyed brunette woman in a simple blouse and jeans. She was picking at her nails with the blade that Castiel recognized as his.

He immediately got on guard. If there was a weapon that could hurt him in that godforsaken place, it would be that one.

“Why are you here?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

“Oh, Sam didn’t send me, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied with a shrug. “I simply got curious about where you went.”

She had to know there was no way he would believe that. She smirked wickedly at him when Castiel walked past her, his grace in high alert, ready to defend himself if she tried to attack him.

He heard Meg standing up and coming behind him, but she simply walked by his side, whistling a little song to herself. She’d tucked his blade into her belt and Castiel wondered if there was a way that he could get his hands on it.

“Do you have to do that?”

“Do what?” she asked, with feigned innocence.

“Why are you here?” he repeated.

Meg pretended to consider the question this time.

“If you’re trying to get out of Hell, you’re going the wrong way, Clarence,” she told him. “You need to cross the Dead Forest for that.”

Castiel stopped on his tracks and turned to look at her. She smiled at him nonchalantly.

“And you probably need to take me with you.”

“Why is that?”

“Some bands of Lilith’s loyalists had taken up residence there,” she said. “They’re probably not just going to let you through.”

Castiel stopped to reflect on all of this for a second. He was certain there was a catch here, but he just… couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

“You haven’t told me why are you here,” he insisted. “If you’re telling the truth and Sam didn’t send you…”

“He and Dean are topside. They don’t know I’m here,” she assured him. “In fact, they went to squash some demons that were causing some trouble up there.”

Castiel blinked at her.

“He wasn’t lying, you know,” she said, before he had the chance to ask. “He really doesn’t care about going to war with Heaven or taking over earth. That’s why Lilith and other demons are so… let’s say restless. They think he’s fucking up Lucifer’s plans for all of us.”

“And you?” he asked, frowning. “What’s your stake in this? Do you want the earth destroyed?”

She said nothing, but tilted her head at him, still with that smirk upon her lips.

“I’ve been watching you for some time, angel,” she said, instead. “You’re completely lost. So if you want to find the way out, you’re really going to need my help.”

“No,” Castiel replied.

He didn’t know when he’d stepped closer to her, but they were almost as close as they were that night outside of the diner, when she’d put her arms around his neck and pulled him for a treasonous kiss. He hadn’t forgotten about it. He had to remember it, because otherwise he would think about her naked skin while she sat on Sam’s lap or her laughter at the other side of the cell’s wall.

Or the way her lips parted right now, as if she was surprised by his reply.

“No?”

“No, unless you tell me what’s in it for you,” he replied. “I don’t trust you.”

“That’s very smart of you, Clarence,” she said. Castiel jolted when he realized that she had put her hand on his forearm and now her fingers were creeping up towards his shoulder. “I would say, that’s the smartest thing you’ve done since getting here.”

Her smirk decayed a little under his scrutiny. Finally, she looked away.

“I want out.”

“Out? Of Hell?”

“Out of Sam’s reach,” she specified. “I told you, I didn’t mind before. But I am done with him choosing Dean over me every single time. The only way I’m going to be free is if I go topside and just… run.”

“So you don’t care about earth and Lucifer’s plan?” Castiel asked.

“Not anymore, I don’t,” she said, with a shrug. “I haven’t caught up with Game of Thrones yet and I don’t want the earth destroyed until I do.” She licked her lips. “Plus, there’s other things topside I like. Booze. Food. Sex where I don’t get my blood sucked dry every single time.”

“You would give up your home for those things?”

“You’ve seen the views,” she replied. “It’s not much of a home, is it? Hell is Hell for demons too, Clarence.”

He’d become aware of it.

He considered it. He did need a guide. He could be wandering around Hell for years, centuries, without finding his way out otherwise. And he truly believed that Meg’s offer was sincere. Or her motives were.

She put the last piece in place when she pointed out the obvious:

“We need each other to get out of here.”

“And the King of Hell won’t try and get you back once you’re topside?” he asked. “You’re his, even if he isn’t yours.”

Meg’s smile disappeared in a gesture of irritation. Her voice remained neutral, however, when she replied:

“Once we’re topside, you won’t have to worry about that. I can take care of myself.”

It was as good a reply as any. And she was right: the less he got tangled in those messes, the sooner he could get out of there.

“Which direction is the Dead Forest?”

“North. Then we have to… hey!”

Castiel ignored her protests as he put his hands around his waist and pulled her closer to him. As if by instinct, Meg’s arms surrounded his neck, grabbing unto him tightly.

He did his best to ignore the warmth of her body and how close to her mouth his face was now.

“What’s the big idea?” she asked, squirming in his arms.

“You can give directions as we go,” he explained.

She opened her mouth, perhaps to protest or to make another question, but Castiel simply spread his wings and the irritation in her mouth turned to sudden surprise, with her eyes wide open and her lips parted. Her gaze moved through his feathers with an admiration that he would have enjoyed if he’d allowed himself to.

“Hang on tight,” he said and with her in his arms, he took off.


	7. Chapter 7

Meg decided she didn’t hate flying.

She was on the fence for a few moments after they soared towards the reddened sky, with Clarence’s tight, firm body pressing her firmly against himself. Her stomach did a backflip and it took all of her concentration to keep her human form in place. She was not made for flying, and though the angel’s arms were strong, she was sure he was going to drop her at a moment’s notice. The fall wouldn’t kill her, but she didn’t really see the appeal to having all of her bones broken in a single swoop.

After a while though, she started to see the appeal. Hell and all its demons seemed tiny from up there, like they couldn’t touch her, like she was finally going to escape the bindings that kept her there, that crept around her and pulled her down every time she managed an ounce of freedom. She liked the way the hot wind blew in her mind and most of all, she liked the way the angel’s body felt against hers.

He was different than anyone she’d ever met before. He seemed so stoic, so calm now, like a rock in the middle of the sea. She still remembered his screams and prayers in the time they had spent side by side on the dungeons, and she had almost considered him pathetic for them.

But then, there had been a time where she had prayed to Lucifer as well. Her father had filled her head with the legend that their Creator was trapped somewhere in Hell, in a Cage deep inside its bowels, and that when his Chosen One arrived, Lucifer would be freed and demon-kind would take over the earth.

The Chosen One had arrived, but the Cage and Lucifer were nowhere to be found. What was worse, Sam had no interest in elevating demon-kind exactly from where they were.

He was proud and arrogant. If he wanted something, he merely took it. He was smart enough that it was nearly impossible to fool him and Meg was certain that he’d seen through her pretending to care for him in more than one occasion. For some reason, it seemed to amuse him. The only time he seemed to lose control was between his fixes of demon blood and even if Meg had had the option to refuse him, he’d always had Ruby or Dean or a bunch of other demons just lining up to let him take them. And he took, and took, and took.

Dean, on the other hand, was all action and fury. He was always restless, always violent. Sam sometimes took his time to tease her or to get her going. Dean never did. He was like a madman that constantly craved something and the only times she’d seen him actually calm down a little had been when Sam had dispensed him a praise or asked him to stay by his side while he did whatever.

Clarence was like none of them, and she wondered if it had to do with him being an angel. Standing in front of him, looking at his face, it was impossible to read him. Meg knew that he had a soft spot for humans and that he had once dared to question Heaven, but all of this she’d learned because he’d told her.

He’d also thanked her, even knowing everything she was, everything she’d done. No one had done that before. Even though they were enemies, even though she’d tricked him.

Meg didn’t fool herself to think she was important enough to him that he would care what happened to her. She’d gone through that with Sam already. But of the three, he had been the only one that hadn’t treated her like trash all of the time. As long as he needed her, at least, Clarence wasn’t going to drop her.

She clung to this notion as tightly as she clung to the angel.

“Is it that place?” His voice felt like a rumble against her chest.

She had been looking over his shoulder, so she had to wiggle a little.

“Yes. That’s where we’re going.”

The Dead Forest lived up to its name. It was a long extension of blackened and twisted trees, their branches stretching towards the sky like hands of supplicants who never had their prayers met. In the middle of it, there was a portal made by two winding trees that opened on a Devil’s Gate in a cemetery topside.

It was rarely guarded, but Lilith’s loyalists had taken up residence there. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince them to let them pass.

Luckily for them, Clarence could deal with them. Or at least Meg hoped so.

They landed right outside where the line of trees started, perhaps because it would have been harder to do so in the middle of them. Clarence put her on the ground almost delicately. Meg wanted to look like she’d been completely unaffected by the trip, but she had to take a few steps until her knees stopped trembling and her legs stopped feeling like jelly.

“Well, thanks for the ride, Clarence,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“That’s not my name,” he replied, matter-of-factly. Everything he said sounded matter-of-factly.

“Well, I told you, I’m not calling you Jimmy. So unless you tell me your actual name…”

Clarence didn’t offer it up to her. He just remained standing where he was, his back very straight and his hands hanging by his sides. He looked very much like a soldier, if it wasn’t for the suit and the ridiculous trench coat.

“Gotta ask, what’s with the outfit?” she said. “Was holy tax accountant the latest fashion when you took this vessel or…?”

“Lead the way,” he replied, dryly.

So, he wasn’t in the mood for talking. Well, Meg could respect that.

She only lasted fifteen minutes before she decided walking amongst those roots was boring as fuck.

“So, Clarence, I was thinking about a thing you mentioned.”

He sighed, unable to hide his exasperation.

“Yes?” he conceded anyway, perhaps because he knew Meg was just going to keep insisting if he ignored her.

“Remember that chat we had in the dungeons?”

“I have perfect memory of everything that’s ever happened to me.”

That distracted Meg from the question she had been meaning to ask.

“Really? Everything?” she asked. “Since you were created?”

“Since I was sung into existence, yes,” he replied.

“How long ago was that?”

He didn’t say anything for a while, but Meg had learned in the dungeons that his silence didn’t always mean that he wasn’t willing to answer the question.

“My first memory is of me standing on a shoreline, watching a little grey fish heave itself up into the beach. An older brother told me ‘Don’t step on that fish. Big plans for that fish’.”

Meg had to take a second to realize what he was saying. Millions of years. Billions. He was so unfathomably old.

And this was the being whose will Sam thought he could break?

The angel stopped and turned towards her, a deep frown in his brow.

“Why did you stop walking?”

“No reason,” Meg said. She cleared her throat and forced her legs to keep on moving. She’d forgotten what she’d been meaning to ask him, so she just changed the topic. “I don’t remember anything about when I was human.”

“Nothing?”

“That’s kind of the point.” Meg shrugged. “You get here and they cut you up in pieces and build you back up into something new.”

“Something twisted,” the angel corrected her. “Lucifer couldn’t really create, so he just destroyed and deformed our Father’s creation.”

“That’s not how I heard it,” Meg replied. She didn’t mean to sound so bitter, but the topic of Lucifer was still a sensitive one for her. “The story I was told was that God was a petty tyrant and that Lucifer stood up to him.”

The angel said nothing. She was kind of hoping that he would counter her story with something else, some preaching about how Lucifer was the bad guy so she could retort that of course he would say that, he’d been drinking Heaven’s Kool-Aid for literally millions of years…

He surprised her once again.

“I fought in those wars,” he confessed. “Before Lucifer was cast out, before he was locked away in his Cage. Many of my brothers and sisters died by my blade. God gave us a command and they refused to follow it. So he gave us the command to stop them. Or that was what I was told, at least.”

“What was the command?” Meg asked. She’d never heard that version and despite herself, she was fascinated by it.

“To love humans with the same devotion that we loved him. To serve them, to protect them. Lucifer… he despised them. He saw them as imperfect, inferior. And he started a civil war for it. He wasn’t the only one who thought it, but he was an archangel so the others looked up to him as a leader.” He raised his eyes, as if his gaze pierce through the thick, black branches, the red sky, the earth itself, all the way up to the place he called home. “I found all that violence so… senseless. I hated it. I was never a good soldier.”

Meg was surprised at all of that sincerity.

“Did you love humans, though? Did you follow that command?”

“Yes,” Clarence admitted. “They were capable of terrible things, but then again, so were we. And with time they created… so much beauty. The chaos and love and art they came up with, their way of rising above those imperfections that Lucifer hated… it was fascinating to me.” He stopped for a second and sighed. “That’s why I questioned their decision to… essentially, kick-start Armageddon when Sam ascended to the throne. When I received the order that we were preparing for war again and that Earth would be the battleground, where humans would undoubtedly become collateral damage… I couldn’t stay quiet.”

“Huh,” Meg muttered. “So, Sam was right about you.”

She had not been able to see that conclusion from the long conversation they’d had and she couldn’t help but to be impressed once more at how smart the Boy King was. The angel stopped on his tracks and turned towards her.

“He was not,” he said, his voice growing stern and angry. “He knows nothing about me.”

Meg opened her mouth to taunt him, to tell him that maybe he wasn’t all that unknowable after all, but a noise to her left interrupted her.

A branch cracking down under the weight of a foot.

Meg’s hand flew to the blade in her belt while Clarence’s shoulders became rigid and his eyes analyzed the shadows, alert.

There were five… six of them. They hadn’t bothered donning their human skins, so Meg could see their true forms, their scaled skins or the texture of marble in them, their small horns growing out of their foreheads like bumps. Their leader had small red eyes that glowed like ambers in the dark.

“Well, well, well,” he said, tilting his head to the side, while the other demons surrounded them. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you Azazel’s girl?”

“Hello there, Jael,” Meg greeted him, trying to sound calm. Maybe if she talked enough, they wouldn’t have to fight. It was a long shot, but she would much prefer not to fight half a dozen of her kin to get away. “Didn’t mean to bother you. Just passing through.”

Jael’s lipless mouth twisted in a cruel imitation of a smile.

“Oh, sweetie. We can’t have that,” he said, taking a step closer to them. “We know you’re one of the Boy King’s whores. And we know you’re no friend of Lilith.”

“Lilith is dead,” Meg said. She didn’t know for sure if she was, but if Sam was smart, he probably would’ve put her down by now. “Your little rebellion is over. You’d do better not to fuck with me.”

“You lie,” Jael said, his smile becoming tense.

“Jael,” one of the demons behind them called. “What is _that_?”

Meg didn’t have to look to know he was pointing at Castiel. Jael’s eyes moved up towards the angel and widened in surprise.

“Well, fuck me!” he exclaimed. “I heard rumors that the Winchesters had captured themselves one of these, but I didn’t believe it!”

“It’s the angel?” another demon asked, their voice trembling. “Should we…?”

Meg unsheathed the blade and held it up.

“I captured it!” she corrected them. She was a little stung that her accomplishments weren’t recognized. “He’s mine.”

The other demons stared at her as if they couldn’t believe what they were hearing and then, all at once, they burst into laughter.

“Sure you did, honey!” Jael said. “And what are you and your angel doing here in the old Dead Forest, if we can ask?”

“That’s none of your business, and you’d do well to stand back.”

Her bravado was not working at all.

“Shit, who needs Lilith when we could have that?” Jael asked, his red eyes glowing with excitement. “We could use it to take Sam down!”

“I don’t work with vermin,” Clarence said.

Jael threw his head back and let out a long bark of laughter.

“Oh, darling, I don’t remember asking your opinion.”

There was a rustle around them. A demon on the right of Jael had two clubs in his hands, the both of them adorned with nails, parts of blades and glass. Meg didn’t have to look around to know they were all similarly armed. Jael pointed the club at them.

“Kill the whore. Take the angel,” he instructed them.

She moved faster than any of them. She didn’t wait: she lunged herself to the closest enemy, avoided their hit and directed the tip of the blade directly into his stomach. The demon let out a gasp of pain, while his skin glowed orange. Meg barely had time to take the blade out before another one was on them.

In the blink of an eye, she was swarmed, overwhelmed. The others had seen what her blade could do, so now they were keeping their distance, but they were still waving their clubs and weapons at her and Meg was trying to move fast enough to…

One of them smash right in the middle of her face. Her skull made a loud crack and the next thing she knew, was that she was face down on the Dead Forrest’s ground, with lights exploding behind her eyelids.

A foot hit her right between the stomach and another went straight to her jaw. Meg tried to roll over, to avoid the kicks and punches raining down on her, but she was surrounded…

A light flashed through the trees. The air was suddenly hot and smelled like ozone, like the air right before a storm.

It was gone just as fast as it came, but Meg felt the heat of it on its skin, the reverent holy dread that was born somewhere in her guts. Her attackers felt it too, because they stopped hitting her in order to turn towards that light.

A body dropped to the floor, carbonized. Wisps of smoke still rose from its skin, its face permanently contorted in a gesture of pain. Meg dared to look up from her place on the floor to find the angel standing amongst some stunned demons. His skin glowed white and bright, his eyes had more silver than blue in them. His hands were extending, power flowing through him like electricity.

And in that moment, Meg wondered how she ever thought of him as pathetic.

The astonishment of his opponents lasted very little.

“GET HIM!” Jael bellowed and they all jumped towards him at the same time.

The angel punched one and pressed his hand against the forehead of another, but a club fell down on the back of his head. It didn’t seem to hurt him, but it distracted him enough for someone to cut through his arm with a machete. Another one jumped on him, trying to tackle him to the ground.

Meg realized that the two demons attacking her had moved to try and get the angel as well and she didn’t think it twice. She grabbed unto the closest tree trunk and staggered to her feet. As soon as she was up again, she sprinted away, jumping over roots and leaning down to avoid the branches hitting her face.

“Meg!” the angel called out somewhere behind her. “Meg!”

There was another flash of light.

He would be fine, Meg told herself as she ran. He was going to be just fine. Why wouldn’t he be? He was mighty, he was strong.

Her hand fell on her now empty belt and she realized with a jolt that she’d left the angel blade somewhere near the clearing where they’d been ambushed. It was probably the only weapon that could cause him any real damage, and she’d left it for the taking.

It didn’t matter. Clarence would be fine.

She felt the air change again, clearer and chiller than the permanently hot atmosphere of Hell and knew she was close. Too close to stop now.

The tree that formed the Devil’s Gate stood on a clearing where the earth was black, their branches intertwining in a most peculiar way, forming a tall arch. Meg stood in front of it, breathing in lightly. On the other side of that arch, freedom awaited her. Freedom from her father expectations and Lucifer’s failed prophecies, freedom from the Winchesters and the other demons that would drag her down to their level.

Earth would be hers, entirely, completely, and she could do whatever she wanted, go wherever she pleased.

Free from Hell, for the first time in what she remembered of her life.

A shout echoed behind her.

The angel would be fine. He didn’t need her. He would be mad he left him behind, but he could handle some punk ass demons.

She took a step towards the Gate, mad at herself for hesitating.

“Sorry, Clarence,” she muttered, as if saying the words out loud were the last push she needed to go on, to take the final steps. “A girl has to take care of herself.”

Another shout and a flash of light behind her.

Then, silence.

Meg closed her eyes.

“Dammit.”

* * *

The blade cut through his clothes, through his skin. Castiel screamed out in surprise and pain as the wounds open on his chest started leaking out grace.

The red-eyed demon, Jael, smiled almost manically.

“So you _can_ be killed!” he said, holding the blade up.

Castiel looked around, at the mutilated or burned bodies of his followers, and knew right then that he had no hopes of surviving this. If Jael’s plan had been to keep him alive, to use him to oppose Sam’s ruling, it wasn’t anymore. He wanted revenge.

Jael jumped at him with such force that Castiel ended up on the ground. His grace was still escaping his body, and he felt himself weakened with every second that pass.

The demon raised the blade above his head. Castiel grabbed unto his wrist to prevent it from coming any closer to his skin, but his enemy was strong, he was relentless.

“When I’m done, I’m going to rip out your head,” Jael said. “And I’m going to throw it at Sam’s doorstep, so he knows just how powerful I can be…”

The tip trembled, mere inches from Castiel’s throat. He buckled and tried to get Jael off of him, but the demon held on, still fighting against Castiel’s grip around his arm, ready to strike…

A black claw burst through Jael’s chest. Drops of black blood sprinkled Castiel’s face, hot and sudden like a summer rain. The demon gasped out and look down at the hole in his chest, as if he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. It took Castiel a moment to understand it as well.

The claw had pierced his back, his muscles, his ribs, grabbed unto his heart and pushed it out as if it wasn’t harder than punching through paper. The black little organ looked like a rotten fruit in the middle of that black hand with impossibly long nails.

It moved back and Jael felt to the side, his eyes open in a permanent expression of astonishment. The blade clattered against the hard Dead Forrest’s floor.

Meg stood in front of Castiel, more demonic than ever. Her eyes were pitch black once again, but there was more: a pair of long, ram-like horns grew at each side of her head. Her nose had changed, deformed in a way that made seem more cat-like, more like the snout of a tiger or a lion in mid-roar. Her mouth was open to reveal large fangs which she then sank into Jael’s heart, eating it whole in two bites.

When Castiel blinked, her face was back to her human form, the horns were gone and the only indication of what she’d just done was the blood smeared on her face.

He didn’t know why that sent a pulse of electric current down his spine. He was wounded, he was tired, and he should be furious at her for leaving him behind. But when knelt next to him, her eyes back to their deceptively normal brown, he couldn’t help the sensation of awe that invaded him.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

Castiel looked down at his chest, as the light leaking out and closed his eyes. The pain was greater than anything he ever felt, anything that Dean had ever inflicted on him. But he refused to let it overwhelm him.

“I’m too weak.”

Meg groaned and without a second of hesitation, she passed her arm around his back and pulled him up. He thought she wasn’t going to be strong enough to do it on her own, but she pulled him up with barely any effort.

“Let’s go.”

Castiel leaned his weight against her, an arm around her shoulders as she half pushed him, half dragged him away from the battleground. His kept his other hand pressed against his wounds, as if that would prevent the rest of his grace from leaking out.

And also… to prevent her from seeing what he’s picked up from the floor. He held it close against his body, hidden underneath his trench coat. It felt so good to have it back. even if he was wounded, even if he was in the company of someone he couldn’t trust, he felt a lot stronger just from having it.

Meg dragged him all the way towards a cave. No, it wasn’t a cave, he realized; it was a tree, so big that the hole in its trunk had the depth and the height of one. She leaned down to guide him inside and gently set him down, with his back against the darkened bark.

Afterwards, she sat down in front of him and she looked… disconcerted. Like up until that point she had been acted on instinct and she was only now realizing what she’d done and what it meant.

They stared at each other, silent and confused.

“You came back,” Castiel said. He didn’t know why he wanted to point out the obvious, but he felt it was necessary. Like saying it out loud made it even more real. He couldn’t believe he was alive.

And he couldn’t believe it was thanks to a demon, of all beings.

“Yes,” she replied. She crawled up closer to him in the reduced space. She still looked rather grotesque, with the blood dripping from her chin and her hands, but Castiel didn’t wince when she placed her fingers on his forearm. Almost gently. “Let me see…”

“It’s fine,” he tried to protest, but Meg was already gently coaxing them away and he couldn’t help but let go of the blade.

It slid down to the floor and even with the very little light they had inside of the trunk, it glinted and caught Meg’s eye.

She looked down at it like it was some sort of exotic, dangerous animal, even though she had been the one handling it before Jael’s ambush. Without thinking, Castiel stretched his hand and grabbed it by the hilt. The familiar weight in his hand was a consolation.

Meg stared at him, and then down at the sharp edges of his weapon.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

She didn’t sound scared. If anything, she was almost… resigned.

Castiel stared at her, at her face so close to him and pondered on how easy it would be to run it through her chest, straight into her heart. He didn’t need her to find the Devil’s Gate anymore: he could feel how the air was thin around them, how close they were to it. A single blow, straight through the heart, and he would be rid of her. Of the demon that had dragged him to Hell.

He slid the blade up his sleeve, where he could keep close but out of her reach at the same time.

“No.”

Meg blinked at him, confused.

“Why not?”

“I need time to heal,” he explained. “And I need someone to be on the lookout. There could be more of Lilith’s loyalists around and I’m in no condition to have another fight.”

“Right.” Meg pulled her hands away from him. “Of course.”

Those were all very practical and logical reasons. Strategic, even. He was a soldier, he was fleeing, he needed to keep his eyes on that goal.

But none of them were the truth. They were truth, but they weren’t the only reason.

Before Meg could get away from him, he grabbed at her wrist and pulled her closer to him. He wanted to look at her in the eye while he spoke:

“And also… you came back for me. You saved me.”

Meg breathed in sharply. Castiel could have almost sworn she shivered.

“Yeah, well,” she said, slipping out of his grasp. “Don’t get used to it.”


	8. Chapter 8

The sky became bright red, then crimson, then bright red again. Castiel fell in that stupor that indicated that his grace was doing all it could to fix his vessel and refill itself after what he’d lost in the clearing, but he didn’t lose conscience for long periods of time. His own internal clock, that, granted, wasn’t all that trustworthy since the time he’d spent in the cell, compelled him to open his eyes and look up every few hours.

Meg stayed by him on that time. Sometimes he saw her silhouette sitting outside of the tree, sometimes she was inside with him. On one occasion, he woke up to not find her at all and he was certain she must have left him behind, for good this time. But when he looked again after sometimes, she was sitting inside of their improvised refuge again, staring at him with big eyes. The blood in her face and hands was gone, as if she’d found somewhere to wash it off, but there were still some stains in her clothes.

“What?” she asked.

Why didn’t she leave him? It would be easier for her if she did, if she simply left him behind and went on her own way. She could slip by whoever was watching the forest, she could stop wasting time and run away before Sam and Dean returned to Hell.

Instead, she stayed. She watched him like a hawk. In more than one occasion, Castiel caught her sitting right beside him, her eyes scanning his face anxiously for… something.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Meg obfuscated: she crossed her arms over her chest and glanced away.

“I’m not looking at you.”

Even though she’d clearly had. He was amused by this blatant lie and he couldn’t explain why. He couldn’t explain any of the positive feelings he experienced around Meg. He should hate her; he should be angry with her or fear that she would betray him if he lost sight of her.

But he didn’t.

He knew enough about her to understand her a little. Loyalty was important to her: she had been loyal to her father and the reason she was so angry at Sam was because he’d failed, in her eyes, to be loyal to her. So if she’d come back to him, if she’d saved him, was because she thought he was worthy of at least a bit of that loyalty.

She laughed when he told her this, but it was a bit forced.

“Just what I needed,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Are you a therapist too, Clarence?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“I have to call you something,” she insisted. “And I don’t know your name.”

Castiel realized that, in the entire time he had been in Hell, he hadn’t revealed this anyone. Not to Sam with his power towering over him, not to Dean under torture. But he wanted her to know it.

“It’s Castiel.”

“Really?” Meg asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Why are you telling me?”

“If you pray to me by name, I will hear it,” he said. He was getting very good at lying to himself about the reasons he did anything around Meg.

“Nobody hears prayers down here,” she pointed out. “You should have realized by now.”

“Call me an optimist.”

“More like a complete sucker.”

He smiled. God forgave him, he smiled at this creature made of darkness and pain and cutting edges.

“I think… in a strange way, you are the closest thing I’ve had to a friend. That’s why I want you to know.”

The confession made him realize exactly how far he’d fallen. Had Heaven really been so selfish as to deprive him of these relationships, of this warmth he felt when he was around Meg? There isolation had been as severe as the one Sam had imposed on him. That had not been fair of them. Was rebelling against their mandates as bad as what Lucifer had done? He already knew he was a poor example of an angel, but what would it make him to admit this?

And what was worse, he feared he had not yet fallen as far as he could.

She let out another one of her sarcastic laughs.

“Oh, that’s sad. That’s really sad, angel.”

“I think you feel the same way about me,” Castiel said, ignoring her mockery. “Why would you save me otherwise?”

Meg stopped laughing and for once, her face became serious. Her eyes were on him now, smoldering and unmoving.

“You want the truth?”

“It’s why I asked.”

She licked her lips very slowly.

“I don’t like the idea of something as beautiful as you dying.”

Castiel didn’t know what to answer to that. In no small measure because, through her thorns and her imperfections, he also found her beautiful.

He shouldn’t. But he was well past the point of caring about what he should and shouldn’t do.

He stretched his hand and grazed the side of her face with his knuckles. Meg startled a little, but she didn’t move away. On the contrary, she closed her eyes and leaned into him slightly, as he let his hand travel down her cheek, her jaw. There was a scar in the spot where her neck became her shoulder, a white cut in relief over her skin. How many times had they cut her for it to leave a mark like that on her?

She shuddered when he ran his thumb along it and her eyes fluttered close.

“I want you,” he muttered. “I think I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you.”

“I lied to you then,” Meg reminded him.

“It’s not something rational. Not something I could control.” He stopped to think about it. “It should have stopped when I found out what you were. But the more I saw you, the more I talked to you… not only did it not stop. It made me want you more.”

Admitting it out loud, confessing just how far he was willing to take those sinful desires, made him strangely lighter. And also, it made it seem like it couldn’t be that bad. Heaven had banished him for something so minor he almost felt like he needed to earn that punishment.

Maybe he was weak, and wicked, and twisted. But if anyone could understand that, it was her.

Meg breathed in slowly and leaned back on the bark. When Castiel moved his hand away, she opened her eyes to look at him with a frown.

“Well? What are you waiting for?”

Castiel shook his head. He couldn’t keep his eyes away from the scar in her neck and wondered how many of them like she had in her body.

“I’m not like them, Meg,” he said, simply. “I don’t want to touch you just to hurt you or to use you.”

Meg clicked her tongue, annoyed. Before Castiel knew what was happening, she maneuvered in the reduced space of their cave to pass a leg over his laps and positioned herself over it.

“I know you’re not like them,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper.

The touch of her lips on his was like a torch that burned away the rest of his doubts. Castiel reveled in it, in the way her hands slid underneath his trench coat and pushed it down his arms. It meant he had to stop holding her for a few seconds, but once it was off, he slid his own hand underneath her shirt and let it covered one of her breasts.

Meg moaned softly against him and moved even closer, rolling her hips against the hard edge of his erection. It gave him a wave of relief, of much needed friction, but he broke away from her kiss.

“No,” he muttered.

“Oh, come on,” she complained. "Are you just teasing me right now?"

Castiel tugged from her shirt and she immediately put her hands up so he could take it off. He kissed her neck, lick up the top of her neck until she arched her back, letting out a soft moan.

"I want this to be different," he said, his lips still close to her skin. "For you. I want you to feel... like you chose this."

"Oh, Clarence," she sighed. She cupped his face in her hands and gently pulled his face up so he would look at her. There was a tenderness in her expression that he wasn't expecting. "I did choose this."

Her words were reassuring, but Castiel still laid her down on the darkened ground and let his mouth roll down her stomach, leaving a trail of kisses over her heated skin while his fingers tugged at her jeans.

Meg lifted her legs and let him take them off her. She was now naked underneath him, breathing heavily and watching him closely, expectantly.

She looked like a human woman in every aspect and Castiel had to wonder if she was showing him that for his benefit. It mattered very little. Just by narrowing his eyes and tilting his head a certain angle, he could still make out the darkness right underneath her skin, the edges of the mask she wore.

And he still wanted her like he'd wanted nothing in his life before.

He tangled his fingers in the soft fuzz that covered her sex and lowered his head towards it.

"You... you'll have to tell me if..."

"Just go for it, Castiel," she urged him, running her fingers through his hair. He dared to think that it was an almost loving gesture.

Up until the point she sank her fingernails on his scalp and pulled him down. Castiel gave a tentative lick at the soft flesh between her legs and was rewarded by a breathless gasp.

He must have been doing something right, then.

Encouraged, he let his tongue reached deeper into her, kissing and lapping at the growing wetness. Her musk invaded his nostrils, the grasp in the back of his head became tighter. Every moan, every time she squirmed and let praise and encouragement fall from her lips, it sent a shiver of pleasure down Castiel's spine. It only made him want to go deeper, faster, to take her closer and closer to the point of no return.

Angels were created for worshipping and it was a blasphemy he was worshipping her body like this.

She finally let out one last, long gasp. Her body went rigid and then relaxed, completely limp. Her skin was hot and her breathing was fast. Castiel found himself unable to take her eyes off of her.

He couldn't fathom how Sam could have her in his bed every time he wanted and yet...

Meg's black eyes fell on him and her hand found the nape of his neck again. She pulled him down for a deep kiss, her tongue playing against his so thoroughly that he suspected she was tasting herself in his mouth.

The thought made him shiver again.

"Your turn," she muttered, her hand travelling down to pat the hardness inside of his slacks.

"I don't... I..." Castiel murmured, suddenly hyperaware that he'd never paid particular attention to that part of his vessel's anatomy. Would it be adequate? Would he know what to do...?

"Don't be shy now," she said, her fingers already working at it to free him.

She ran her hand up and down the shaft a couple of times before gently guiding him into her. Castiel closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the sensation of it all. He'd never thought... he never imagined this would how it felt like...

He sank into her until there was no way to tell where he ended and she started. The rest of his clothes were suddenly a nuisance (he wanted to touch her, to feel every single one of her curves against his) that Meg was all too happy to help him get rid of.

"Meg..." he whispered.

"Start moving, angel," she instructed, with a soft kiss on his temple.

He sank his face on his shoulder and did as he instructed. His thurst were slow at first, as he tried to get used to it all: the friction, the way his skin was set aflame, Meg's hips rolling along with him, helping him find a rhythm. But after a few moments, he simply got lost in it all, he got lost in her. He started moving faster, erratically, satisfied with every noise that came from her lips, ecstatic at the way she raked her nails through his back...

He wasn't aware of the pleasure that had been building up the pit of his stomach until it spilled over, until his entire body lunged forwards and became undone, until a sudden haze inundated his mind.

Bliss. Unforeseen, intense, white bliss.

It felt a little like Heaven.

It left him trembling and confused, hanging unto Meg's body until she laughed and moved to leave a kiss on his dampened hair.

"That was beautiful, Clarence."

* * *

The sky changed colors one more time. They remained just where they were, exploring each other's body, taking each other to new heights over and over again. Castiel was like a man that had just crossed the dessert and found an oasis in which to satiate his thirst. Or better yet, like a man who had never known he was thirsty until he'd tasted water for the first time.

"I understand now," he said, with his fingers lazily tangled in Meg's hair.

She was stroking the black feathers in his wings, which he'd spread despite the reduced space to serve them as a blanket of sorts when she'd complained about lying on the floor.

"What do you understand?"

"Why this is forbidden," Castiel explained. "One could give up Heaven for something like this."

Meg's expression, that had been relaxed and happy until barely a moment ago, changed. A furrow appeared in her brow and her brown eyes were suddenly fill with worry.

"Cas, you can't be serious."

He enjoyed the way she said her name now. Like it was familiar, like they had been lovers for centuries instead of just mere days.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I can't come back, Meg. I have been gone for too long. As soon as I step back on Earth, they're going to bring me home, they're going to go through my mind. And every memory of what I've gone through here, including this... they're going to take it away from me."

"They do that?" she asked. She sounded genuinely surprised. "That's terrible."

"I have been through that process... I really don't know how many times," he confessed. "I wasn't aware of it until Naomi told me that if she got in my mind one more time she was going to break me. So they just put me somewhere my doubts wouldn't cause any disturbance."

Meg stayed quiet. Her fingers resume the stroking and Castiel closed his eyes. Despite the threats that hanged over the both of them, he felt content right then. He throught there would be some guilt, some regret at having let his emotions and his desires carry him so far, but there was none of that.

Lying there, with his hand lazily on Meg's thigh and her hot breath in his face, he felt at peace like he hadn't in a long, long time.

"And wouldn't taking away your memories now break you anyway?"

"I don't think they would care anymore. I have laid with a demon. I am tainted beyond salvation."

"Do you feel tainted?" she asked. "Because I feel so... clean."

He chuckled and pulled him closer to her.

"We can hide away on Earth," he proposed. "You and me. We can just... disappear. I know they're going to hunt the both of us, I know that there's a chance Heaven and Hell go to war anyway. But we could..."

She placed a hand on his cheek and shut him up with a kiss.

"I wish we could do that," she whispered.

"What do you mean?" Castiel asked. His peace was suddenly disturbed, not just by her words, but by the bittersweet smile on her lips.

"I mean, Sam has been back for a couple of days. He's been calling me and I've been ignoring him. It's like a pull in my gut, compelling me to go back to the palace. If I leave Hell now, with him here and paying attention to me, he'll know exactly where I went and it would take him all of five minutes to catch me again."

"What?" Castiel stared at her, startled. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were hurt," Meg said, with a shrug, as if that was all the explanation needed. "I couldn't leave you."

She said it with such confidence, with such calm, that there was no real way for him to protest.

She kissed him one last time and sat up with a sigh.

“But you can still go.”

“What do you…?”

“You can go back to Earth. Hide. Sam’s not going to look for you. I will find some other chance to escape.”

It was almost like a promise, but Castiel didn’t fool himself about how flimsy it sounded. She could be locked away in a dungeon, or Sam could simply keep her by his side with other pretenses. He could be captured and dragged to Heaven and be made to forget about her. There was too much left up to chance if they didn’t escape together, but Meg had already said that would be impossible with Sam calling upon her.

There had to be another way.

“Castiel?” she asked, softly.

He realized he had been staring at her back in silence for a long time. He sat up and left a kiss on her shoulder.

“I’m coming back with you.”

“What?” Meg shook her head. “To the palace? You can’t…”

“I’m going with you,” he said, simply.

She didn’t like it, of course. He didn’t expect her to.

But it was the only way.

* * *

“I’m going to go look for her.”

“Dean…”

“Our informants said she went into the Dead Forrest!” Dean replied, furious. “Lilith’s loyalists had set up camp there, they’re escaping to earth through that Devil’s Gate! She’s going to stab us in the back…”

“Dean,” Sam repeated. “It won’t be necessary.”

Dean paced around the Throne Room, impatient and furious. He never trusted Meg, he never trusted any of them. He knew they would all turn on Sam given half the chance and he was not going to stand by it.

Sam, however, had instructed him to stay put and Dean wouldn’t even think of disobeying.

“Why are you so calm?” he asked, exasperated.

“Because, she’s already on her way here.”

Dean opened his mouth to ask how he knew that was the case when a flutter of wings distracted him. Through the Throne Room’s opened door, he saw Meg, standing calmly in front of it, with the angel, of all creatures, standing behind her. He caught a glimpse of his long, black wings as he folded them back behind his back.

The both of them walked towards Sam, like they were taking a stroll in the park. Dean immediately placed his hand inside his jacket, ready to pull his Blade out if they tried anything, but they stopped at a very safe distance from Sam.

“Meg,” he called out, still speaking with that same confidence. “I called you and you didn’t come back.”

“Yes, my lord, I’m sorry,” Meg said, bowing her head with humility. “I was… occupied.”

“I’ll say,” Sam replied, leaning forwards. “I can smell the angel all over you.”

Meg didn’t even attempt to deny this. In fact, the way she raised her chin at Sam, with her teeth clenched tight, was almost defiant. As if she was daring him to say anything about it.

Dean would’ve cut her throat just because of her insolence.

The moment he thought about it, though, he felt the smolder of a pair of eyes on him. He looked up to see the angel, standing perfectly still, his shoulders straight and his hands to the side, the image of the perfect soldier.

But there was a warning in those eyes, something that Dean couldn’t ignore. He hated him, of course, and Dean needed to be careful. There were no wards and spells to restrain the angel this time if he decided to attack Dean.

However, after a few seconds, he turned his attention to Sam.

“I am ready to make a deal,” he announced.

Anyone who wasn’t familiar with Sam’s expression couldn’t have told how pleased he was at this development. Dean knew that the way the edge of his lip quivered and then returned to its place meant his brother was positively exulting. Sam stood from the throne and took a step towards the angel.

“Is that so?” he asked. “I’m listening.”

“I will be your informant,” the angel said. “Like you asked me to, I will keep you informed of all of Heaven’s movements. And if it comes to that, I will fight in your ranks.”

“Sounds good to me…”

“But I will only spill the blood of another angel _if_ it comes to that,” the angel interrupted him. “If they come to threaten the earth and the humans, if they insist on total war… but until then, I will not raise my weapon against them.”

“You have an awful lot of considerations they would not have towards you,” Sam commented.

“They are still my brothers and sisters. I know you understand how important that is.”

Sam’s gaze fell upon Dean and he shrugged. He really didn’t know what the angel was playing at there, but he was not going to protest if he really wanted to work for them.

“Very well,” Sam agreed.

“One more thing,” the angel said. “From now on, Meg is mine. You don’t touch her. Your brother doesn’t touch her. Whether it’s for your pleasure or to hurt her, it doesn’t matter. She belongs to me. And if you don’t respect that, the deal is off.”

“What the…?” Dean started protesting, but Sam raised a hand, indicating him to be quiet.

He was considering it. Or at least, he was pretending to consider it.

While he did that, Dean turned his attention towards Meg. She stood a few steps behind the angel, with her arms crossed over her chest, not really looking at any of them, as if that conversation didn’t concern her at all.

Clever bitch.

“I don’t know,” Sam said in the end. “After what you did to Ruby and what Lilith tried to do to me, Meg is really the only consort I have left.”

“That’s my price,” the angel replied, sharply. “If you aren’t willing to pay it, then we have nothing else to discuss.”

The smirk in Sam’s lips was almost sincere.

“Well, you could give my crossroads demons a run for their money, Jimmy…”

“Castiel,” the angel corrected him.

Dean was surprised and he was certain Sam was too, but he hid it better.

“Castiel,” he repeated. “Okay. I think we’ve reached an agreement.”

It was impossible to tell if Castiel was pleased with that or not. He stretched his hand, but Sam completely ignored it as he stood closer to him. He cupped Castiel’s face in his hands and leaned down to give him a brief kiss on the lips, sealing the deal. When he broke away, he patted him in the cheek.

“Don’t disappoint me, angel,” he said, stepping back. “Hope you’re worth the price I paid for you.”

Castiel said nothing. He turned on his heel and headed for the door, but he slowed down as Meg caught up with him. Dean watched with a certain shock as she grabbed unto the angel’s hand and leaned into him, a gesture of intimacy he’d never seen her had towards Sam.

Not that he would’ve allowed it.

Sam snapped his fingers and the door slammed closed.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Dean exclaimed, as Sam fell on his throne and burst into laughter. “I tortured him for months and got nowhere! She gives him some ass and suddenly he’s ready to be your lap dog?”

“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Sam said, between chuckles. “Oh, Meg really outdid herself.”

Dean stared at him, trying to grasp completely what he was saying there.

“Wait… so you didn’t tell her to fuck the angel?”

“No. She did that out of her own volition.”

Dean shook his head.

“I don’t like that,” he said, approaching the throne, closer than any demon would’ve dared to without Sam’s explicit permission. “Sam, what if it’s some sort of trap? What if they’re up to something?”

“I have no doubt that they are,” Sam said, with a shrug.

Before Dean could ask how he could be so calm about it, Sam hooked two fingers on the edge of his jeans and pulled him closer to him.

“But it doesn’t matter what they’re up to,” he said, as he placed a hand on Dean’s shoulder and without any gentleness, pulled him down. Dean had to hang onto the armrests of the throne to keep his balance. Sam placed a hand on Dean’s cheek and drew circles on it with his thumb as he continued to speak: “Lilith, Heaven, them… it doesn’t matter what anyone does. As long as you and I have each other, they can never defeat us.”

Dean rested his forehead against his brother’s with a sigh. Sam was right, of course.

* * *

They waited until they turned around the corner at the end of the hallway. Castiel practically jumped on her, pushing her against the wall and pressing his body against hers. Meg opened her mouth to his kiss gladly, hungrily.

It didn’t erase the bad taste in her mouth that Castiel’s deal had left her with.

He broke away and stared at her face and she knew she didn’t have to say anything for him to understand.

“You don’t approve of what I did.”

“I don’t like it, no,” she admitted. “I don’t trust the Winchesters.”

“Neither do I,” Castiel said. “We don’t have to trust them. We just have to stay together.”

Meg wished it was that simple.

“He’s drunk so much of my blood,” she pointed out. “He still has his pull on me. It will take a while for me to be cleansed from it.”

Castiel nodded and to her surprise, he raised his blade up. Meg’s eyes grew wider when he loosened his tie and undid the first button of his shirt.

“This might help,” he said, as he made a small, transversal cut right underneath his collarbone.

Grace started leaking out of it, silver and liquid. Meg stared at it, taken aback, but Castiel’s arms around her waist were firm. He didn’t want her to turn away.

“Are you serious?”

“It won’t hurt you,” he assured her. “My grace is an extension of my will and I would never…”

“It’s a part of _you_ ,” she interrupted her. “And you would let me… just…? Why?”

Castiel grabbed the hand she had on his chest and delicately pulled it up to his lips.

“Because I want you to know I’m yours.”

Meg trembled. She remembered telling him, once upon a time, how much she wanted something that was hers alone. She couldn’t believe he remembered it.

She moved forwards, still unsure, but the grace became a vapor when her lips were close and found its way into her mouth without her drinking or breathing it in. It burned on her tongue, on its way into her lungs, as if her very demonic essence was rebelling against it. Her heart sped up and her blood was aflame, every inch of her body feverish and strange…

But she kept going until Castiel pulled her back. He ran two fingers over his small wound to close it while Meg breathed in slowly.

The pain passed quickly, but the sensation it left behind… something pure had entered into her, something she wasn’t sure she deserved. She knew what they had just done was sacrilegious on so many levels, something deeper than just sex or words or deals.

But there was no trace of regret in Castiel’s face as he smiled at her.

“Mine,” Meg repeated, reverent.

“Yours,” Castiel said, leaning in to kiss her again. “Forevermore.”


End file.
